Thursday, May 17, 2012

Hacking Communities?

By Daniel Turbin


You might have already heard that hackers are typically 'lone wolf' types who operate unconditionally all alone, and there's some truth to that. Hackers do have a tendency to be highly individualistic folk, each with his ( or her ) own way of doing things, but don't let that fool you.

Increasingly, hackers are banding together in groups, sharing knowledge, swapping stories, sharing strategies, and the like , and this makes them orders of magnitude more threatening to you and to the security of your company's data.

It's not a new phenomenon, either. In the youth of the Net, the group called The Legion of Doom made waves by hacking into a number of systems that everybody presumed were well shielded and nigh on very unlikely to breech. More recently, the group called 'Anonymous' has made similar news.

The particular dangers that groups like these pose is twofold. On the one hand, when you put these highly intelligent, independent minded folks in a room together ( virtual or alternatively ), and see them start sharing their techniques and tales of their exploits with each other, they can, in the course of a single night's conversation, come up with radical new methods to breech systems that leave the network security vendors selling business grade product scrambling to think up a satisfactory response.

On the other, the formation of such groups invariably lead straight to what you could call 'intramural rivalries,' and to show its supremacy over other such groups, each will redouble their efforts to outshine the others. Each will work more diligently to break the allegedly unbreechable system.

Sadly, if you run a company whose really existence is dependent upon your info ( and increasingly, this applied to almost every company doing business ), that puts you in a spot you do not need to be. Squarely in their cross-hairs.

Due to this, you owe it to yourself and to your company to have the best web security you doubtless can, which includes your policies and procedures, software solutions, and periodic audits to make sure that everything is as solid as you can presumably make it. Remember, you have got to protect everything simultaneously. All points of entry must be guarded. The hacker only desires to get a single chink in your virtual armor to gain entrance. Don't let that occur.



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