Cyber Attacks and Related Concerns

We witnessed many cyber attacks on various companies in 2014, but the attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment was the most fatal and the hacker’s identity is not yet confirmed. FBI is blaming North Korean Electronic army because few North Korean IP addresses were traced during the investigation. Sony Pictures were about to release a comedy “The Interview” and the plot is the assassination of North Korean President King-Jo-Un , who is equal to God for North Koreans.

Hackers introduced themselves as ‘Guardians of Peace” GOP, sent a malware “Wiper” in Sony’s computer system infrastructure and deleted entire data from the servers. Hackers took all the official and personal emails and data. The impact was very controversial that Sony’s Co- Chairperson Ms Amy Pascal’s racial mail communications were also published by the hacker and she was fired.

According to Kaspersky main threat comes from external sources as Spam and then from
malware attacks in the form of viruses, worms and Trojans. Priority is always given to protect confidential data because from just one data security attack an average of $80000 is lost. Damages caused by one targeted attack are $2.4 million in an average. When a company’s IT infrastructure is attacked, the amount of data loss from internal operations is calculated as43%, financial data as 22% and client data as31%

Main concerns for a company should be protection of sensitive data, prevention of IT security breaches, mobile device management, unreliability of IT systems, and client management. Obstacles to maintain IT security are heavy expenditure, lack of IT awareness among stakeholders, complexity of IT products and services, lack of support from IT vendors, lack of staff training facilities, co-ordination issues between business administration department and IT department, and access to the corporate network through personal devices like mobile and laptop.

Main strategies companies adopt are installing anti malware protection, software update management, encryption of highly sensitive data, physical security of IT system against theft and calamities, implementation of disaster recovery policy, creating separate IT policy for laptops, pc s and notebooks and regular audits. IT threat is considered as the number one threat for any businesses, than economic instability, and brand reputation. IT threat also includes computer fraud, industrial espionage and intellectual property theft.