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Security Compromised By Employee Naivety
By Anthony Ashard
In a recent study to locate and determine the affects of a widespread attack by hackers based in Europe and China who successfully broke into computers at more than 2000 companies and government agencies over the last year and a half, discovered that they were hacking in a highly coordinated global attack that exposed enormous amounts of personal and corporate secrets. This breach is normally initiated by sending fake enticing emails to the companies employees in an attempt to get them to visit compromised websites and open email attachments. Once initiated the infection soon takes hold of a companies computers allowing hackers to gain full access and steal everything of value. In one attack a secured credit card verification server was compromised allowing hackers to get unrestricted access to passwords and account details of thousands of customers. The largest hole in any security system is the weakest link in that system, so when your company has many employees accessing the internet, it only takes one employee to infect and entire network, compromising the security and infrastructure from within. Companies should set-up regular training courses addressing and educating staff in all aspects internet safety and security. Without such training any company can fall foul of spyware and hacker abuse. In a recent 2009 study, as many as 83% of all companies questioned, admitted that they would rather lie to a client to protect any loss of reputation, rather than admit they have serious security failings in their computers and internet security systems. Because of this failure to disclose information about security issues in company computer systems, little is done to protect them from future attacks and breaches in client information.
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Contributor's Note
Do you own a business that has experienced malicious compromise of a computer system, or have you trained yourself or your employees to understand and deal with the risks of unsafe internet usage? I'd like to hear your views...
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What does it take to make a computer secure?
A simple keypress can infect a whole system
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I'll say! Lying to save face sure is prevalent, but is never a good business practice.
This is frightening stuff, Anthony...
Why am I unsurprised? Especially about the lying, of course they lie to save face. You can't find out about anything like that until someone blows the whistle.
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
Not so much about lying directly, but not disclosing the security flaws and recent attack statistics to share holders is in my mind the equivalent to lying. In some cases the person/s responsible for ensuring the companies computer system remains safe failed to report incidents and in some cases failed to detect that the system was compromised until data was reported missing by the client.
Disturbing information, for sure. As for employee training, certainly that should be part of any company's practice. Unfortunately, even training will not completely eliminate human error nor will it guarantee that all employees will follow the procedures at all times. I'm self employed, which means I'm responsible for keeping my own computers secure. I do a fairly good job of it, but I get careless and slip up from time to time.
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
It's interesting to learn that you take care of your own business security, do you actually educate yourself about the various aspects of data theft prevention, and firewall control?
Now I'm even more happy that I am a "small company"... ;)
The copyright for this content entitled "Security Compromised By Employee Naivety" has been specified by the contributor as:
All Rights Reserved
This content may not be copied, distributed or adapted by anyone under any circumstances.
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This intel was contributed by Puniksem
Puniksem
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May, 2012
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