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Will the credit crunch really affect IT security?
So the financial crisis has supplanted compliance, green IT and all the other buzz words peppering vendor press releases in recent years, but are the security implications of it really that serious? Well, yes and no.
The obvious one to watch out for is phishing. As has been noted by Trend Micro and others, the disruption in commerce - with firms being bought, sold and merging - creates great opportunities for the hackers to harvest personal log-in and other details. A phishing email for example could be sent out to customers of an ailing bank, saying that the institution in question is going to be sold and needs to reconfirm all of its customers' details.
Then there is that other byproduct of an economic downturn, people are going to lose their jobs. But we're still skeptical about the predictions of Kaspersky Lab, Trend and others that this is really going to turn unemployed software engineers to the dark side. Alright, it might make one or two think twice about where their loyalties should lie, but it would be a stretch to see it severely unbalancing the delicately weighted good versus bad battle between hackers and anti-malware writers.
What's more likely is that witless people in search of some extra money to get them through these hard times are conned into becoming money mules and other members of the online fraud chain.
December 18, 2008 | Permalink
The effect the credit crunch is having is one of making organisations batten down the hatches and focus on protecting what they have. The first steps for managers in 2009 are likely to be examining cashflow and headcount, but they would be well advised to make a New Year’s resolution of conducting an IT vulnerability assessment and examining protection of the perimeters of their network to ensure their IT assets and intellectual property are protected.
IT security threats are ever changing. Some of the biggest threats for 2009 will be infection via malicious code inserted into legitimate websites, and reputation hacking by exploiting vulnerable websites and domains. The growth of Web 2.0 platforms makes the potential to pass on malware even easier by making people desensitized to running code within browsers – so less likely to spot any odd site behaviour.
Failing to protect against these threats now could have dire financial and business continuity repercussions during the year.
Martin Blackhurst, Product Manager, Redstone Managed Solutions
Posted by :Martin Blackhurst | December 23, 2008 11:17 AM