Breaches, attacks continue to scale up
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
And the beat goes on:
- Insider data theft continues unabated. During April, several universities—Miami, Colorado at Boulder, Virginia, Toledo, Southern Connecticut State, Massachusetts, Buffalo State, and Northwest Missouri State—reported data breaches with records for more than 2 million people stolen, according to Ted Julian, VP at Application Security, Inc. The Miami heist was the biggie: thieves targeted a delivery truck carrying backup tapes carrying records for everyone who visited the university’s medical facilities since 1999, 2 million records.
- Low level crooks are stock piling data swiped from top-tier global businesses. Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak recently located a rogue server, dubbed “Crimeserver,” parked in
Finjan notified over 40 major international financial institutions about their data turning up in Crimeserver. The fact that Crimeserver’s controllers took no steps to encrypt or otherwise restrict access to their cache of stolen data suggests they are probably mere script kiddies. Pros would never be so sloppy. “You don’t have to be computer savvy to do this,” say Ben-Itzhak. “You just have to buy a tool kit which is what this hacker did.”
- Elite cyber gangs are stealthily roaming inside corporate networks. Mi5 Networks has discovered trojans and botnets in every organization where it has deployed Web security systems. “One common thread we’ve seen is that these new forms of malware are extremely sophisticated at staying under the radar,” says Mi5’s CEO Doug Camplejohn. For example, out of 9,000 botted machines, the controller generally used no more than 15 active bots, while keeping 149 in a dormant-but-ready for re-activation state.
“Only 5% to 15% of Trojans and botnets we discover are active at any given point in time. However, when they do become active they are very efficient,” says Camplejohn. “In one particular site we saw over 100 botnets perform over 14 million scans in one month period - trying to identify other vulnerable machines they could infect.”
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