2003 Worst Year For Hacks
June 2003
Digital attacks are getting dangerous as web services taking personal details including name, age, sex, home and office telephone numbers, addresses and credit card numbers are being targeted. May has seen nearly 2% attacks on large entities with listings on NASDAQ, NYSE or other international bourses.One NYSE listed US company whose web servers were attacked on 3rd May by a Brazilian hacking group, TNT, is engaged in selling autoparts online and has over 16,000 employees and a market capitalisation in excess of $1.9 billion. The lyrics of the John Lennon song "Imagine" were plastered on that site and a protest about "War on Terrorism" was made.
Economic damage is rocketing as identity theft and credit card piracy is becoming rampant. Web sites are no longer electronic brochures as they lead to valuable databases that harbour sensitive information on millions of customers. The cost of the economic damage is not just the man-hours involved in getting the computer servers up, reconfiguring them and clearing any malware. There is also a huge cost involved in informing all affected customers that their details have been pilfered and they are advised to either increase vigilance for fraudulent transactions on their next bill or cancel their card. This is damaging trust in web enabled services and the cost of reputation-loss for the victim corporations and government agencies is difficult to estimate.
May 2003 has now broken three crucial records for digital attacks
1. The highest number of overt attacks in one day - 4th May - 2,576
2. The highest number of overt attacks in one month - latest for May - 22,077
3. The highest number of overt attacks in one year - latest for 2003 - 87,903
"The first five months of 2003 have seen an equivalent number of overt digital attacks to those recorded in the whole of 2002. At the present rate, 2003 is likely to cross 220,000 overt attacks for the whole year, nearly two and a half times the number for 2002," said DK Matai, Executive Chairman, mi2g. "Online commercial interests of the US and UK are coming under escalating waves of attacks worldwide especially since October last year. Some of this is linked to the war with Iraq and war on terrorism, some to criminal syndicate activity, and the rest is down to 'attacks-for-fun'. Always-on 24/7 broadband connectivity is increasing hacking attempts by several orders of magnitude."
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