Who Are The Attackers?
A recent survey of 1,600 I/S professionals in 50 countries was conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and reported in the Aug. 98 issue of Information Week Magazine. The survey showed the greatest threat comes from within -- 58 percent reported authorized users and employees as the source of a security breach or corporate espionage acts within the past year. Thirty five percent said the sources of attack were unknown.
Closely followed at 23 percent were unauthorized users and employees. Much lower percentages were reported from cyberpunks, former employees, contract employees, suppliers, customers, competitors, public interest groups, foreign governments, or other sources.
How Do These Attackers Get In?
Often it''s easy to find wide-open doors in the operating systems of the servers themselves. The UNIX operating system and TCP/IP have over 100 known vulnerabilities that are somewhere between patched and ignored. Information about these vulnerabilities travels rather quickly and spreads virulently throughout the world of would-be thieves. The Internet is a great tool to use to learn about the Internet -- both its strengths and weaknesses.
As Microsoft Windows NT Servers become more pervasive, they also become a larger target to those looking for new vulnerabilities that they''ll inevitably find, creating a race between those installing new doors with locks and those trying knocking them down.
Internal networks make an easy target to those wanting in. With the droves of auto-answer enabled modems pervading modern desktop computers throughout organizations, auto- or war-dialers will locate access points from the inside -- far easier than trying to break-in from the outside. Once a LAN-connected PC is under a perpetrator''s control, all network resources are at risk -- including back-office networks.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
