You’ve probably heard that hackers are mostly ‘lone wolf’ types who operate wholly on their lonesome, and there is some truth to that. Hackers do have a tendency to be highly individualistic people, each with his ( or her ) own way of doing things, but do not allow that to fool you.
Increasingly, hackers are banding together in groups, sharing information, swapping stories, sharing secrets, and similar and this makes them orders of magnitude more dangerous to you and to the safety of your company’s info.
It isn’t a new phenomenon, either. In the youth of the Net, the group called The Legion of Doom made waves by hacking into a bunch of systems that everyone presumed were carefully protected and nigh on very unlikely to breech. More lately, the group called ‘Anonymous’ has made similar announcements.
The particular hazards that groups like these pose is twofold. From one perspective, when you put these very smart, independent minded people in a room together ( virtual or alternatively ), and see them start sharing their strategies and tales of their exploits with each other, they can, during the occurrence of a single night’s conversation, come up with radical new methods to breech systems that leave the network security sellers selling economic grade product scrambling to think up a satisfactory reply.
On the other, the formation of such groups usually lead directly to what you might call ‘intramural rivalries,’ and to show its supremacy over other such groups, each will redouble their attempts to outshine the others. Each will work much more diligently to crack the allegedly unbreechable system.
Sadly, if you run a company whose extraordinarily existence relies on your information ( and increasingly, this applied to nearly every company engaging in business ), that puts you in a place you do not need to be. Exactly in their cross-hairs.
Because of this, you owe it to yourself and to your company to have the best web security you possibly can, which includes your policies and procedures, software solutions, and regular audits to make sure that everything is as solid as you can potentially make it. Remember, you have got to protect everything concurrently. All points of entry must be guarded. The hacker only wishes to get a single chink in your virtual armor to gain entrance. Don’t let that occur.
