90% of businesses have, according to Juniper Networks and the Ponemon Institute, suffered a cyber security breach in the last 12 months. 90%? Wow!
Certainly, just looking at the security breach headlines of the last few days, you would have to conclude that far too many organizations don’t give a damn about online security. News reports in my inbox today:
- Baltimore employee hacks employer’s system to show porn to the board;
- 4 Brazilian Government websites shut down (third hack this year);
- Petrobras website hacked and graffitied;
- Red Cow Marketing & Technologies in Canada hacked;
- News International servers hacked (a revenge attack)
And these reports are all subsequent to the arrest, earlier this week, of a 19-year old now facing charges under UK Computer Misuse legislation. Guess what – there must be more than one person out there with the skills, capability and interest in hacking into your website or network!
Over the course of the last few weeks, we’ve heard that hackers have identified security vulnerabilities and have exploited them to hack any number of high profile organisations:
- SOCA (the UK’s Serious and Organised Crime Agency)
- IMF
- CIA
- CitiBank
- Sony
- Nintendo
- Sega
- Fox
- British Phonographic Industry
- International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
- PBS
- US Senate
- Etc
So, unless you are carrying out regular monthly or quarterly hackerguardian scans and/or regular penetration tests, and with the average cyber attack costing its victim something in the order of .5 million US dollars, you have to ask yourself: ‘Do I feel lucky today?’ Well, do you?
