International digital espionage has been a poorly kept secret, but in the last couple of years, the lid has been blown off state actor efforts to steal information or money from companies, or hold them to ransom, with broad-based efforts to break into any company, whatever the actual value.
By Chris Knight
Iran, North Korea, failed states and major world powers are all involved in concerted hacking efforts. You might think they are aimed at the U.S. Government, Defense Department and businesses that build planes, ships or are involved in billion-dollar deals. Yes, those are targets, but well-defended ones, so hackers will take what they can get from less protected sites and businesses.
In reality, they are hacking with automated tools that sweep across billions of IP addresses and endpoints daily, and will happily steal from 100 small businesses that can provide them with high-value U.S. or European currency, credit card or personal data files they can sell on black markets, or cryptocurrencies they can siphon off for their own deals. A recent United Nations report singled out North Korean as having grabbed over $2 billion for their own uses to counter world sanctions and to help fund their own nuclear efforts.
This puts every business at risk and makes having solid defenses a requirement for any type of company, from a growing array of hacking tools. U.S. Cyber Command recently released some examples that the North Koreans are using, one example being “Electric Fish” that creates a digital data tunnel through which data can be leaked through a backdoor to their own servers.
How to Protect Against the International Threat
Modern IT security has moved far beyond the need for a firewall and antivirus software. Every connection and link could be a weak point, every printer, router and smart device a risk. The risk grows as hardware vendors use unbranded parts, chips and circuitry, mostly from Chinese factories, to reduce costs. They could contain their own digital payloads to make something seemingly innocuous like a cheap webcam or wireless router into a potent weapon.
Therefore the security needs of any business need to enterprise-grade regardless of their actual size. They also need to be smart, working proactively to counter threats the day they are created, using penetration testing to ensure your network is secure, good administration practices and auditing to ensure every cloud feature like Amazon AWS, GDrive and service is protected.
Busy growing companies often lack the skills to build a secure network, while startups often go with off-the-shelf tools but don’t know how to properly manage them. All of these create risks that can be managed by partnering with an IT and security expert to help build a secure solution, with the tools to manage the security on your behalf with backup and recovery services to help in the event of any type of IT failure.
As the number of IT-based heists booms, and events like data-ransomware grow, it is only a matter of when your business will fall prey to some kind of attack. Perhaps it only some low-end chancer demanding a few bitcoin, but if all your data ends up on the dark web, or a foreign power wipes out your bank accounts or corporate credit cards, your business may struggle to recover, making solutions and services from KokoBo.net vital to fighting this battle for you.