Why does every company in the globe fear cyber crime so much?

by Guna Nadar - 11/3/2015 2243 Views

One doesn’t need to be that sharp to realize that cyber crimes have been on the rise lately.

According to Rupert Murdoch, “everyone on this planet seems to be getting hacked”. This includes cops and consultants, the Senate and Sony, City and IMF, and corporate ranging from Google to the old PBS. Hacking has in fact always been in the “digitization mix” but it has been over the past couple of years that the trend is on the rise. Here are some facts that show that every industry is being covered by the hacking trend:

The April of 2011: Sony Playstation Network shut down for a couple of days for “external intrusion” and compromised more than 77 million user accounts in the process.
The September of 2012: GoDaddy services websites blacked out after a hacking attack.
The January of 2014: Twitter confirms that a hacker has been able to a user to lose his account.
The December of 2014: Spiderman and James Bond movies compromised from a Sony hack
The Christmas of 2014: Microsoft Xbox Live Network and Sony Playstation (again) were attacked and this rendered gaming devices unusable.

As we can see, no industry is spare from hacking. In this digital age, information is money and there are a countless number of ways to find unauthorized access to it. In the year 2013, there were more than 63,000 major hacking attacks was confirmed by Verizon.

Some of the most discussed hacking in recent news and why they happened

The Ashley Madison Case

A premiere dating site for married people looking for infidel opportunities, Ashley Madison goes by the tagline “Life is short, have an affair”. Since 2001, more than 40 million users had registered with the site to find their sex partners. Imaging if the guilty users were somehow exposed! Well, it really happened when a team of hackers calling themselves “The Impact Team” exposed several users including TV stars like Josh Duggar. Hackers were not only able to retrieve the complete database of users but also created a 73 git of repository for the source code behind the site. Apart from harming the credibility of the site and getting an opportunity to defame its users, several hackers now have the window to read into the source script of the site and make their own ways to profits.

The Impact Team reportedly has to resort to one of the simplest hacking means to expose several pictures, emails, profiles and messages communicated through Ashley Madison. Known as SQL Injection, it targets software vulnerability and causes the backend SQL data to spill the data. Now that the service provider has already seen the dark days, it is working on auditing its entire source code to search for backdoors and loopholes.

New York Times website hack - 2013

In 2013, Chinese Hackers were able to consistently access the database of New York Times reporters, employees and subscribers for more than four months. The hackers installed a malware that allowed them to access any computer of the Times network. They were confirmed to have stolen the passwords of every New York Times employee and used these to gain access to the PCs of 53 employees hosted outside the Times network. Though no customer data has been stolen it was mostly a broader espionage against western media. The hackers were even skilled enough to cloak these attacks by routing the access through United States universities, giving them the time to make a longer breach.

In this case, the hackers used compromised computers in several universities in New Mexico, Arizona, Wisconsin and North Carolina along with the systems of several ISPs and smaller companies in the United States.

Though New York Times was able restore all backdoors, it just shows how such a secured served can too be exposed.

The Carbanak Gang

This time it was about money. Already being referred as “the great bank robbery”, a cyber crime gang from China stole more than $1 bn from across 100 institutions spanning 30 countries over a period of 2 years. The gang spread across Ukraine, China, Russia and some European countries have been stealing loads of money by bypassing e-payment systems, bank severs, and other financial institutions.

So how was it possible? The Carbanak Gang used sophisticated looking emails that included a word document. They sent it to bank employees, who when downloaded it, unknowingly ran and executed a malware that gave hackers direct access to their systems. They then used the information to inflate bank accounts (to save suspicion), transferred money to their accounts, and took control of ATM that dispensed money at pre-arranged times.

There are many more of such examples creating news every often. However, all of them only suggest how foolproof organizations have to become to save themselves the trouble. It is understandable if the talks about cyber crimes have increased in the recent times as companies are taking extra steps to precaution.

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About Guna Nadar

Brief Info about Guna Nadar +

I mostly write technical aspects and not much into creative writing. For the past decade I worked along with top notch SEO & Internet Marketing professionals which naturally lured me into the world of Search Engines. When I am not writing I read from comics to philosophy.Antiques, Fishing, hunting are my passions. Currently I am working on Google Penalty protection and .... more info