I took a week off from blogging over the holidays. It was an eventful time for illustrating how insecure our cyber infrastructure has become. A few of the more notable events:
- The Wall Street Journal reported on a series of cyber attacks on Citibank accounts that made off with tens of millions of dollars. Citibank denies the breach. See Report: FBI probes hacker attack on Citibank. I've blogged on this topic before, most recently last month. It is notable that even the director of the FBI will not bank on-line.
- A denial of service attack on DNS service provider UltraDNS shut off access to Amazon and other retail sites prior to Christmas day. See Amazon Hit With DDoS Attack. This was a brief outage but during the Christmas season a brief outage can result in a big loss of income. It illustrates how vulnerable DNS can be to denial of service attacks.
- The Obama Administration appointed Howard Schmidt as the new Cybersecurity Chief, ending a 7 month search. We can only hope that he is given some real authority. Early signs are good.
As we enter 2010 it is increasingly apparent that we are losing ground to increasingly organized and financially motivated cyber criminals - some of whom are state sponsored.
In my last posts for the year I'll talk about some of the threats expected for 2010 and some positive news on solutions.
Comments