Cyber Attack in the US: The Silent Wars

 

There is a silent war in America and I fear it has been going on for some time. Cyber Attacks are certainly in our vocabulary now, but it doesn’t seem like anyone is taking the Hacking of America” serious. Corporations, Government, and personal information are all being stolen and lives threatened. While Sony may have made some mistakes, they are vulnerable like all of us. I don’t understand why the US government isn’t working with Sony and helping them make strategic decisions, rather than ridicule them. It seems to me the threats we are receiving is clearly a national problem and not just that of Sony corporation.

After seeing this recent headline, I fear we are missing the point – “Hacked corporations don’t deserve our sympathy”. While there is no love-loss for Sony after they abused individuals in emails they had been exchanging internally – big mistake. However, the larger picture is that we are under attack. There are threats of “911 like attacks” and personal injury by Governments hiding behind “Anonymous Hackers”. These are real threats and should be taken seriously like every other terror threat.
 
Hack Facts
And there not just threats – they are crimes. Data is being stolen and compromised around the world. Here is a staggering fact according to CNNMoney – “Half of America was hacked this year”.

Hackers have exposed the personal information of 110 million Americans – roughly half of the nation’s adults – in the last 12 months alone. Even more mind-boggling is the amount of hacked accounts which is up to 432 million.

The records typically stolen includes personal information, such as your name, debit or credit card, email, phone number, birthday, password, security questions and physical address. But not always all that much information.

Cyberattacks are so frequent and numerous that company’s like Unisys say “we’re now experiencing “data-breach fatigue.” Here is some staggering data from the most recent cyber attacks (read’em and weep:

 

When will  it stop?
70 million credit cards and other customer data was “compromised” at Target this past January. That’s an incredible amount of data. But Target was not the only one in 2013. Some of the bigger hacks in 2013 included LivingSocial, Washington state Administrative Office of the Courts, Evernote, Drupal.org, and one of the internal websites of the Federal Reserve.

 
You say “Drupal who”? Well guess what? Drupal is a free, open-source web development platform for online content and user communities. Drupal powers some of the busiest sites on the web, including WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and Examiner.com (insert sigh here).

The US government and companies should be working together in order to thwart these attacks. I don’t want anyone controlling the cloud but we’re going to have to compromise a little, or be compromised. Living in the cloud has its disadvantages. We truly do not know where everything lives anymore.

Live Map Shows Thousands Of Cyber Attacks As They Happen

Norse, a cyber security firm specializing in live attack intelligence, provides live intelligence data to companies such as HP, and has an interactive map of cyber attacks on its website where users can watch the action as its happening. 

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.

Moving forward.

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