Let's think of this analogy: security and threats in the cyber world is a new vector that's no different than the vectors that we have in the physical world that have evolved over time. If you think of the risk that we face now and what has changed now versus the past, there's always a pendulum that swings back and forth between security and between people being able to get past those defenses. Then, we figure out new ways to defend against those particular risks and then the pendulum swings back into the favor of the good people. This pendulum swings back and forth, and that happens all the time. It's been happening on the physical world and it's clearly happening now in cyber space and since the first days of computing.
In the mid 90s replicating email worms went all around Microsoft Office. It was a simple email which people clicked on because it said “I love you” and everyone's computer became infected and all over the world computers systems were down for a couple of days while that was cleaned up. That was 15 years ago.
What Is Different Right Now, At This Point Of Time?
When this particular swinging in the pendulum is particularly severe and I am talking about why some of these things have changed but let me draw an analogy again. Anyone who has been in Ireland or Scotland and driven around the countryside they must have seen all those beautiful castles. They were invented as a way to protect families and communities from a particular type of threat.
Then as the threat evolved, people built scaffolding or ladders to get up on the castle wall and built them higher. They also built moats around them, they put flaming oil at the edges and over time there was always a modification to a protection mechanism which is pretty solid.
A castle, make it wider, higher, put a river around it. The analogy of what's happening right now in our world it's like having those castle walls and then all of a sudden a helicopter comes out of nowhere and just landed in the middle of that castle. If those protections that people have put in place and relied upon for years aren't effective for the types of threats which we face today.
There are a lot of reasons for that and explains why this has become much more heightened at this point in time. To see the result at IBM they have a vast set of technologies which they bring to bear in the marketplace but also they help customers manage security. They have data centers all over the world for monitoring what's happening in some of their customers environments. This way they are able to capture the root cause of what actually happened.
For example, banks in the United States up to a few months ago were really being heavily attacked by a Distributed Denial of Services; attack coming from many different places. Actually a Distributed Denial of Services Attack by definition is thousands or tens of thousands of computers around the world attacking a particular site. It's distributed, the intent is to deny service to that particular website or that particular web service.
What Are These Weaknesses
Ultimately it's weakness on how a software or how a system is configured or it's a flaw in the software itself, which allow a malicious piece of software or a malicious operator to get access to something they shouldn't get access to. For example, nearly every piece of software is highly networked and gets access to databases, so that software has mechanisms to call into, to get information from those databases. That's important; every single time we go and do anything in the world right now we are retrieving information, we are depositing information, we are running transactions. What happens if there is a flaw in that software, where somebody can basically trick it to start making calls that it should be making which allow somebody to see information in a database station. That's actually an example of an attack well-known for many years. It's called SQL injection attack.
Related information at :
https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/timsalivan/~/405026/blogs/-/blogs/symantec-protection-suite-small-business-edition
http://www.authorsden.com/amerigoarcuri
https://yourstory.com/read/ac8ea70307-why-i-started-outsourcing-parts-of-my-online-business
