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Hacktivism, New Threat to Corporations and Governments

A rising surge of cyber attacks motivated with political intentions is touching such critical heights that it's challenging enterprises about the manner in which they need to establish their defenses, a report suggests.

The report, which Gunter Ollmann, a reputed botnet researcher and a member of Damballa, a computer security company provided, presents a comprehensive picture of the recent tendency of cyber protests that are politically motivated, or hacktivism, as per the news published by darkREADING on April 19, 2010.

Hitherto, the organized crimes as described above have been executed on adversary governments like Georgia and Estonia as well as big businesses like Project Aurora. However, according to the new report, it's possible to find "cyber protests" executed for a variety of reasons and on any organization at a random.

Ollmann notes that attacks of these kinds use all sorts of subjects, and any sort of number of people- thousands or just a few- can launch them, as reported by DarkReading reported this.

The expert further says that these attacks provide a much broader scope for potentially striking on corporations. Moreover, they're largely troublesome to safeguard from. That's because they aren't essentially criminal in nature, while even the companies' own customers can execute them.

Besides, as social networks increase in popularity, these targeted Internet attacks become simpler to arrange and regulate.

Nevertheless, several security professionals warn of the dangers of hacktivism as the phenomenon influences the security strategies of organizations. For example, the hackers' key objective is to penetrate the machines or to steal valuable and sensitive data of the companies.

Reportedly, for many years so far, IT companies have been establishing safeguards to refrain from financially driven cyber-criminals who seek saleable data like intellectual property, personal records or customer lists. But, politically driven cyber assaults may be executed only for creating embarrassments or causing botherations to the target companies. Consequently, they could employ attack vectors of much wider varieties.

Ollmann says that these could be defacement of Internet sites, or DDoS conditions, or even malicious software. It might also be scores of Internet users trying to store scores of e-mails in a single inbox.

As the rise in cyber protests continue, it becomes imperative that IT cells work to devise and launch counter attacks, the researcher stated.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/1/2010

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