“… The next Pearl Harbor that we confront could very well be a cyber-attack”
-Leon Panetta, Former CIA Director
This statement could not be truer, look at everything in
this world, it is all going online. Movies, schooling, shopping, books, and
more are all now online. It is almost like we never need to leave the house,
heck you can even work from home if you land the right job. So why wouldn’t
everything turn cyber?
Recently there was a believed cyber-attack that took down
all of Sony Pictures and was believed to be carried out by the North Korean
Government via a group of cyber thugs that identified themselves as the “Guardians of Peace”
or “GOP.” The reports on exactly who carried out this cyber-attack have varied,
but the US Government pointed
the finger at the North Korean Government for hiring a group of blackhat
hackers to carry out the attack.
It is believed that North Korea is upset over a recent film
that Sony Pictures produced called “The Interview” with Seth
Rogen. In the movie, Seth Rogen is a cutting edge reporter who is sent to North
Korea by the US government to carry out a hit on the North Korean Dictator.
This movie is a comedy that has more ridiculous moments in it than serious
accusations on how to assassinate anyone.
Was North Korea sending a message to the US government?
Cyber warfare
In the past, it used to be more customary for one country to
attack another by bombing a city, taking down a landmar,k or assonating a
leader. However, with so much of pretty much any countries’ infrastructure
being stored in computers or on a network, it is now possible to bring a
country to its knees with a few clicks of a mouse.
In a related story to the Sony Pictures attack, on the day
after Christmas all of North Korea’s Internet was taken down by a hacker.
Immediately the North Korean government called the United States out saying
that they were responsible for the outage. North Korea even went as far as to
call President Obama a racial slur, a “monkey.”
The power of a countrywide Internet outage and how to protect your company
Stop for a moment and consider the impact of a widespread
internet outage, this means no commerce or communications via electronic
mediums. This could even potentially effect phone communications since many
people and organizations use voice-of-IP. A countrywide outage would also bring
all trading to a halt on Wall Street or any other stock exchange, which could
potentially impact a countries economy to the tune of millions of dollars if
not more.
Protecting your company is important and finding the right
combination of protection is always best. Many companies simply protect
themselves with an antimalware software and call it a day, not even considering
the other factors that can play into harming their company. Protecting the
front door of any organization is crucial to protecting the company as a whole.
When discussing the front door, I am talking about your login portals. Having a
weak password policy, no password policy, or even a lack of a second factor
authentication is something to put a
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