A call to arms against the hacker hordes — from sloanreview.mit.edu by Theodore Kinni
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Attribution and retribution in the fight against cybercrime: Imagine being enthroned at the end of the long table in the C-suite. You’ve got riches beyond imagination at your disposal; tens of thousands of vassals are toiling day and night for you. Your knights surround you, awaiting your command. And, at this very moment, some evil-minded jester with a computer and an Internet connection is breaching the castle walls.
But wait, is that a war horn you hear in the distance? Yes, it’s the lawyers from Steptoe & Johnson riding to your rescue. Enough, says partner Stewart Baker and trusty clerk Victoria Muth in an article for Brink. “It’s pretty clear that building higher walls around our networks is a dead end. So is tighter scrutiny and control over what happens on the network,” they write. “Government is failing us…, too.” The solution? Fight back.
Attribution and retribution are the weapons in this counterattack. “It might mean building ‘beacons’ into documents so that when they are opened by attackers, they phone home to alert defenders that their information was compromised,” suggest Baker and Muth. “It might mean using information provided by beacons to compromise the attackers’ network and gather evidence as to the attackers’ identities. It might mean stopping a DDOS attack by taking over the botnet, or by patching the vulnerability by which the botnet conscripted third-party machines.”
Also see:
Machine Learning – New Weapon in the Hacking Wars? — from by Ed Featherston
@CloudExpo #API #Cloud #BigData #MachineLearning
Excerpt:
It feels like the barbarians are continually at the gate. We can’t seem to go more than a week before a new data breach is in the news, impacting potentially millions of individuals. The targets range from companies like Omni Hotels, which had been breached affecting up to 50,000 customers whose personal and credit card information was exposed, to North Carolina State University, where over 38,000 students’ personal information, including their SSNs, were at risk. As I mentioned in a recent blog ‘Internet of Things and Big Data – who owns your data?‘, we have been storing our personal and credit card information in a variety of systems, credit card companies, banks, online retailers, hotels – and that’s just naming a few. The information in those systems is more valuable than gold to the hackers. The hacker attacks are constant, creative, and changing frequently.
IBM is training Watson to hunt hackers — from washingtonpost.com by Andrea Peterson
Excerpt:
Watson, IBM’s computer brain, has a lot of talents. It mastered “Jeopardy!,” it cooks, and even tries to cure cancer. But now, it’s training for a new challenge: Hunting hackers.
On [May10th, 2016], IBM Security announced a new cloud-based version of the cognitive technology, dubbed “Watson for Cybersecurity.” In the fall, IBM will be partnering with eight universities to help get Watson up to speed by flooding it with security reports and data.
From DSC:
I try never to judge anyone, as I don’t want to be judged (Matthew 7:1). I try to extend grace, as I, myself, have nothing to stand on.
That said, I struggle with how to deal with and view hackers. Daily, they wreak havoc on institutions and individuals throughout the globe — causing billions of dollars of damage.
I’m amazed at the lack of punishment dealt out to hackers. Our governments don’t step in, likely because they are all trying to hack each others’ systems as well.
But the individual and group-based hackers out there have created an underground economy…where one wakes up and goes to the office and hacks away, all for making some coin — just like a normal job evidently. These hackers have smarts, know-how, and intelligence — but they have chosen to put it towards destructive purposes. And there doesn’t seem to be any fear involved in doing so.
Well, that needs to stop! There needs to be major punishment for those who hack.
That’s why the articles above caught my eye. We need to fight back against the hackers. We need to release serious damage to their systems, networks, hardware and software — just as they do to ours.
I don’t like to take this stance. I don’t like to even use the words “fight back.” But there is warfare going on — and fear needs to enter the equation for those who would resort to hacking.
BTW, I’m even nervous about posting this item…as some hacker could come after my site. If so, I hope to be back up and running again soon. But if not…yet another one bites the dust.