What? According to new research released by Deloitte, three quarters of firms in the technology, media and telecoms sector have been victims of cyber attacks over the last year, a 13 per cent increase on 2010’s statistics.
So What? Hackers and crackers, whatever their ultimate motives, appear to be one step ahead of the game.
The TMT companies bearing the brunt of this are being targeted for two reasons. Firstly for being innovation-rich; their lifeblood often consisting of closely-guarded IP, particularly the underlying source code of the software underpinning their products. Secondly because the sheer size of their customer bases means that often they will operate automated payment systems meaning they hold the payment card details of anything from thousands to millions of customers.
Some hackers are motivated by a “beat the system” technical mentality, with no apparent desire for personal enrichment. However, for those criminal gangs whose metier is financial gain there are rich pickings to be had from all this information.
This research comes as further evidence of the extent of the cyber-attack problem which is producing much frantic scurrying from those stakeholder agencies whose remit is to combat it. Most notable is the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (“ICSPA”), whose chairman David Blunkett has today called for “cyber security silos” between government, law enforcement and business, to be removed.
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