SBS becomes special malware-casting service: everyone next?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 18 July 2011 22:31

Opinion and Analysis

Predictions that 2011 would be the year of malware and cybercrime have certainly panned out, with the website of Australia's SBS TV network the latest to suffer hacker infiltration.

With the skills of hackers having grown immensely over the past few years, the scale of recent hack attacks against companies like Sony, and the multi zero-day Stuxnet worm has also played out alongside councils and websites being hacked.

Besides the SBS website hack over the weekend which saw some computers targeted by malware, recent hack attacks also saw newspaper sites being attacked, likely leading every publisher to ask their IT people to ensure their content publishing systems are as secure as possible to avoid similar intrusion.

The SBS attack was first noticed by Reddit users and then reported on by the Sydney Morning Herald. It led to the SBS issuing a public statement and making an apology to anyone who might have been affected.

Unfortunately, this attack is but one of many more to come, with end users the target alongside organisations whose websites have been infiltrated and loaded with malicious code.

Alongside sites hacked to deliver malware, intrusions into all manner of organisations will continue as hackers, emboldened by past successes or the successes of their peers, seek new challenges and try ever-bolder attacks and intrusions.

All that can be done to avoid infection by some net nasty is to have full backups alongside everything being patched and updated, with multiple Internet security technologies in place to deliver layered protection.

Meanwhile, companies need to engage in ongoing penetration and security testing of their online and internal assets to both guard against attack and quickly deal with one if a successful penetration has occurred, with a view to ensuring the method used to break in can never be used again.

Given the fact there are many online criminals out there, we are all in their sights and the least protected and updated are likely to fall first, while those who take their digital security seriously are much more likely to survive any unintended malware encounter.

So, please don't put off checking your security status, and if you're not 100% sure what to do, ask someone for help in real life or seek help online to ensure everything you have is up to date and you're running the right protective software.

Otherwise the next hack attack/ID theft/botnet/rootkit/Trojan/malware victim could be you - and nobody, save the bad guys, wants that!