By now most of you have heard of corporate networks being attacked. These attacks typically originate from malicious individuals who are connected to thea Internet that we like to call hackers. Hacking in and of itself is not a bad thing. The true meaning of hacking in the modern sense of the word is: "one who is proficient at using or programming a computer; a computer buff."
Individuals who use their computer skills for illegal purposes have given the term hacker a bad reputation. This article focuses on the frequency and some methods of illegal activity on a corporate computer system from individuals with malicious intent.
Denial of Service
In February 2000 the most significant attack on corporate networks occurred - and you may recall this event: Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon and CNN were among the 4 largest victims of a denial of service attack that caused the websites to be unavailable for roughly 3 hours. A denial of service attack is caused by multiple machines sending network traffic to one particular website. The overwhelming amount of network traffic causes the website to become unavailable and thus incurring millions of dollars of losses as in the February 2000 incident. In that incident, the sites were down for only a few hours. Had they been unavailable for days or weeks, the financial losses could have bankrupt the organizations. There are roughly 4,000 denial of service attacks worldwide every 7 days. These attacks are against small countries, public organizations and home users; basically anyone connected to the Internet is a potential target.
Weak Security
Another method of network breaching is by gaining unauthorized access to a corporation through system vulnerabilities and bypassing weak security controls. The Computer Security Institute generates the Computer Crime and Security Survey every twelve months that summarizes responses from participating organizations across the United States. This year 503 organizations participated in the survey and approximately 125 of those participants stated that their organizations' website suffered unauthorized access and misuse in the past 12 months. Of those, 53% stated the attacks came from outside sources such as the Internet, 5% came from inside sources, 18% came from both inside and outside sources and an alarming 24% did not know where the source of the attack originated.
Many times each security breach costs an organization financially. It may be a soft-cost of having to reassign responsibilities to already overburden IT staff to fix the problem, or worse, it could publicly embarrass the organization resulting in the loss of customers and vendors. Another relevant statistic that the survey uncovered was the percentage of the participating organizations that experienced unauthorized use of computer systems. Out of the 503 respondents, 56% stated they experienced unauthorized access to their computer systems, 29% percent stated they had not and 15% stated they did not know. It should be known that many organizations do not report security breaches to law enforcement or any public reporting agency due to the possibility of corrupting their image. The statistics are only meant as a guideline, you can find more information at http://www.securedigitalsolutions.com
Attack Prevention There are just two simple methods to prevent external attacks on a corporate network: Prevention and Awareness. Both are key to promoting the healthy networks that our business depends on for day-to-day activities. Most corporations employ security professionals who are adept at following both legal and industry standards in developing network security programs.
Chad Boeckmann
CISSP, GSEC
http://www.securedigitalsolutions.com
