The recent report by McAfee concerning Cyberwarfare makes interesting reading and should prompt large scale revisions of internal computer security:
The McAfee White Paper on Operation Shady Rat states: “What we have witnessed over the past five to six years has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth — closely guarded national secrets (including those from classified government networks), source code, bug databases, email archives, negotiation plans and exploration details for new oil and gas field auctions, document stores, legal contracts, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) configurations, design schematics, and much more has “fallen off the truck” of numerous, mostly Western companies and disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archives of dogged adversaries.”
The most consistent entry point for Cyber-attacks has been through the actions of unwary employees. The majority of the attacks have been as a result of people opening attachments they shouldn’t and via the e-mails they receive. As long as people are unwilling to use caution in their usage of the Internet there are problems but that creates another issue. The care that is recommended by security experts often means that people are asked to curtail their use of the Internet and avoid using some of the more useful communication tools. It becomes a balancing act as the restrictions can compromise efficiency.
There is a lot of finger pointing at certain nations and there will be ongoing discussions on this issue. For Governments and companies more stringent security measures are to ramp up computer security and to put employee’s system uses on a short leash. The end result will be loss of efficiency and higher IT costs. To read the full story click on the link.
