The Bad Examples
The survey done by hackmageddon every month shows the motivations behind hacking attacks in the month of February. As you can see 64.5% of all attacks in the month of February were due to Cyber Crime, where as only 7.9% were due to Hacktivism. This is why there is a much more prevalent amount of stories in the press about these Cyber Crimes, rather than the stories about those doing good. Now-a-days the press is generally only sharing the negative side of stories because it draws more attentions and more viewers, therefore more ratings and more money for those media outlets. But to know the capability of these attacks are we need to look at some of these cases. The most famous case and the largest retail breach on record occurred just years ago in 2014 when Home Depot released they had 56 million customer credit and debit card information stolen over a period of five months. This happened, however, because Home Depot had a lack of security to their systems and their cyber security teams being understaffed and overworked. And the problem with Home Depot’s security teams stems from their lack of listening to their employees concerns that were brought to management’s attention.
Over the period of three months Home Depot went from having about 60 employees on their security team with a variety of responsibilities, from ensuring that the company’s security standards were up to industry standards to finding security flaws in their network, to about 30 employees. This made that work and responsibilities very difficult on those 30 or so employees remaining. In 2014 after this attack the HuffingtonPost interviewed a former employee, who left after his team brought security concerns to management that were not addressed. In this interview with HuffingtonPost, the former member of this security team said, “It was painfully easy to capture that data.” This is scary to know that there are people out there working for these companies bringing to their attention that yours and my data are at risk and they are doing nothing about it. We trust these companies with our precious and important financial data and they are just treating it like it’s no big deal.
Another example of one of these attacks occurred in 2016 when several large internet services were brought down by a very complex Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack. This attack brought down services like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud, Airbnb, and even The New York Times provided by the company Dyn. A DDoS attack is defined as an attack where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected by a Trojan horse, are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
In this attack against Dyn hundreds of thousands of internet connected devices such as home routers, cameras, and even baby monitors were infected with software that allowed the hackers to direct them to flood Dyn’s servers with an overwhelming amount of traffic, and all of this without the users even knowing their devices were taking down some of the largest websites on the internet. These attacks started around 7 a.m. on Friday Oct. 21st 2016 and the company were not able to get these attacks under control until 9:30 a.m., however they were once again under attack at 11:52 a.m., and after fending off that attack was again under a third attack at 5 p.m. that night. Now this was not your average, typical DDoS attack, but rather a very complex and sophisticated attack using a new type of malware called Mirai. This is a picture of the message those trying to check on Dyn’s webpage about their services being down would have seen on the day of the attacks.
Attacks like these have been becoming more frequent, as well as bigger, having doubled in size compared to typical attacks. DDoS attacks are regularly used to attack other things like live streamers. These attacks were very popular a few years ago and seemed to only be happening at the entertainment of the attackers, although some attacks were on large video game tournaments where money was involved to try and sway the outcome and cheat those out of winnings they may deserve. This specific attack on Dyn though shows the growth and change in these types of attacks and the ever need for security personnel to keep their skills up to date and current. An article written by the New York Times about this attack features this, “DNS has often been neglected in terms of its security and availability,” Richard Meeus, vice president for technology at Nsfocus, a network security firm, wrote in an email. “It is treated as if it will always be there in the same way that water comes out of the tap.” It is attacks like these that prove that in this day and age companies need to take cyber security very serious and employ those who can keep up with the ever growing and changing baby that is cyber security and hacking.
The cost of these cyber attacks are much more than it would cost to prevent these attacks by hiring and training individuals to help these companies protect themselves from attacks. And while the government may keep their focus and upkeep on this topic secret as they do not want foreign governments to know where they are at or what they are doing, private companies need to be actively recruiting and advertising the need for these individuals.
