The big news of the week is celebrities are eschewing smartphones for flip phones. What you ask? Yes, flip phones, those clamshell devices which most people associate with the luddite relative you just saw at Thanksgiving. The reason? They are afraid of their topless photos getting stolen. Of course they could just not take them but celebrities just don’t seem to be able to help themselves.
This got me thinking… No data center or company is secure anymore either. We know that if a hacker really wanted to get into a company they could but what we didn’t expect was just how easy it is becoming to prove the poin.
The news of the week (actually just Monday and Tuesday) is enough to give you a sense of the chaos we’re dealing with. Iranian hackers it was revealed have hacked 50 organizations in 16 countries. Cylance said in an extensive report:
Ten of these victims are headquartered in the US and include a major airline, a medical university, an energy company specializing in natural gas production, an automobile manufacturer, a large defense contractor, and a major military installation.
In addition, a group known as FIN4 is hacking Wall Street financial firms in a bid to gain privileged financial information about non-public upcoming market moving announcements, according to a new report from FireEye. The basic security flaw being exploited here is weaponized documents which exploit known flaws such as running Microsoft Visual Basic (VBA) macros to get ahold of user names and passwords. A suggested way to protect yourself is to block VBA macros and FIN4 domains.
Recently Sony had its movies and other important documents stolen. As part of the attack, salary info was taken and as a result, reporters have decided to turn this information into fuel for, you guessed it, a class, race and gender war. At issue, this reporter thinks there are too many white men making all big bucks at the firm.The point is, this leaked information will cause immeasurable harm to Sony, destroy morale and put them at a major competitive disadvantage.
The hack was bad enough that the FBI warned US businesses via a confidential flash warning regarding software that overwrites a company’s hard drives. A Sony spokeswoman said the company had “restored a number of important services” and was “working closely with law enforcement officials to investigate the matter.”
Sadly, there is no flip phone for your data center yet but be sure you spend enough time, energy and effort ensuring you have done everything you can to keep your corporate assets and secrets away from prying eyes. Remember, one bad link, clicked upon by accident can wreak havoc if you don’t have the right software and/or procedures in place.
