Monday, February 23, 2015
Sony got nuked, said
one security expert. But it’s hardly the only attack aimed at a major
corporation. Tens of thousands of cyber-attacks are launched every second – a
majority of which are directed at the United States – but few have the impact
that can force a Hollywood studio to cancel a film.
“There’s really no
other word for it,” said Kurt Stammberger, a security expert and vice president
for marketing at Norse, a cyber-security firm specializing in live attack
intelligence. “What’s happening at Sony is really the nightmare scenario for
every organization.”
The Northern
California-based company, which provides live intelligence data to companies
such as HP, has an interactive map of cyber-attacks on its website where users
can watch the action as its happening.
“It’s a little bit like
the weather – it comes and goes in storms and bursts,” said Stammberger.
Except, unlike the
weather, the attacks, represented by streaks of colored lines, is only one
tenth of one percent of all cyber-attacks. The whole map would be covered if it
were to show every attack, so a random sample is all that’s shown.
Norse is able to come
up with this data by placing more than eight million bait computers, or what
they call “honeypots,” in 167 different data centers and 47 different countries
where they’re attacked by hackers who think the bait machines hold credit card
numbers or other sensitive information.
While the continuous
barrage of cyber-attacks makes for an engaging map that looks more like a
hacker version of the board game Risk, it highlights how pervasive cybercrime
and cyber-attacks are in this day and age when megabytes if not gigabytes of
our own personal information and financial records are stored and collected in
servers where we can’t attest to its level of protection.
Thankfully, it’s not
just defense for the good guys. See the mysterious node object on the map in
the ocean just southwest of Africa? It’s not a ship or even an island full of
hackers unleashing attacks. The node represents attacks launched on the
offensive by the U.S. government, placed in the ocean to shield the location of
where the attack is originating.
