Comments on: Hacking for dollars

These days, attackers are motivated more by money than the desire to write disruptive worms like Sasser.

System Intrusion - Think and Assess your Needs

The ever growing problem of network and computer intrusion has forced companies to take a harder look at how they treat their systems. No longer are the days of "hoping" that nothing would go wrong if you simply did nothing to protect assets. Instead companies, now more then ever, are working to actively deter hackers and malicious code. Implementation of more advanced firewalls, IDS and monitoring and filtering software are working to prevent the outsiders from entering and those on the inside from taking advantage of their position within the security of the network. It?s the responsibility of those working in the IT field to place security at the top of their list of considerations when designing and implementing systems. Placing huge walls or cutting your company off from the rest of the world aren?t solutions. Taking time to weight the pros and cons of security productions and methods and making the best decision based on the level of security you need are important steps all companies should take.

System Intrusion - Think and Assess your Needs

This looks like a brochure.

Holy cow, this is irresponsible.

I've read the article over twice, and I have yet to see one shred of evidence that supports almost everything claimed in this article, other than the word of a series of vendors that claim this. Aside from the publicized Israeli companies, they claim quite a bit without any real evidence. Frankly, their opinions, tainted not only by their desire to sell products and services, not to mention their companies resounding past failures in the security arena, makes their claims suspect.

Not once did the reporter produce any evidence other than what they said. No contact to law enforcement to back up anything that was said.

Aside from this, the term "hacker" appears to have changed (and no, I'm not debating hacker vs. cracker). In the past it was considered someone who used technical means to circumvent security. By their definition, it's someone who sends an email from a bogus address, or establishes a server front end to gather information from the very, very gullable. By this definition, any spammer could be considered a "Hacker". This being the case, the author and indeed the companies portrayed here show their ignorance of security, IT, and in general, the subjects that they're speaking of.

Their ignorance, combined with their commercial interests make this one of the most suspect articles written by an amateur I have seen on C/Net for quite some time, and that's saying a lot.

[Steven N]

Had exactly the same thoughts...

Also, nothing new gets added, just recycling old news.
Must be a slow day at c|net...

[Mister C]

Bravo!

Right on!

[Stating]

State Sponsored Hacking

Not to be overlooked is the considerable amount of State sanctioned/sponsored hacking. I've detected a fair number of intrusion attempts hitting my router from China. Given that China has a complete lockdown on their citizen's use of the Internet -- access control, logging everything everywhere, they are not oblivious to what is going on. Which either means they don't care, as long as other countries are hacked and not China itself, or they are actively sponsoring this activity to engage in espionage, theft, or disruption of other countries' infrastructure. I'd like to see CNET do a future story on what our "friendly" trading partners are doing to us, and what governemnt officials from agencies like Homeland Security have to say about it.

Examples of attacks:
Jul 06, 2005 20:37:31.671 UTC - (UDP) 222.136.251.125 : 49451
Calendar Protocol
descr: CNCGROUP Henan province network
descr: China Network Communications Group
descr: Beijing 100031

Jul 06, 2005 20:25:43.687 UTC - (UDP) 210.74.232.191 : 1261
SQL Slammer Worm
descr: Shanghai Global Network Co.,Ltd
descr: No.111 Zhongshan South Road


Jul 06, 2005 19:42:50.093 UTC - (UDP) 218.23.142.22 : 3987
SQL Slammer Worm
descr: CHINANET Anhui province network
descr: Data Communication Division
descr: China Telecom


Keith
www.techcando.com

State Sponsored Hacking

..I don't think that this is really true.

Keep in mind, they're behind content filters, not firewalls. Being infected by a worm, and it spreading over to here isn't neccisarily state sponsored hacking.

Remember, China has an enormous software piracy economy. Patches generally aren't available to a lot of these people. How many of these are coming from China? How about Brazil? Pakistan? Any other countries?

Besides, if it were state sponored hacking, don't you think they'd give them something a little better than a 4 year old worm to do it with?