Assume YOU Are Hacked!!!

Let me explain with a small history lesson:

It is a good assumption that as the Internet helped create a global community, we are no longer connecting our computers to a LAN – Local Area Network with a firewall that can defend the network against  the local regional troublemakers(the local youth or hackers that are learning computer tricks) .  This was the era of the late 1990’s and early 2000 era.

 

A slow but inexorable advancing maliciousness of the criminals was occuring with most of us not paying attention. We noticed more spam in our mailboxes. Spam was a nuisance .As time passed into 2005 all we noticed was the advancing sophistication of Viruses and spam with phishing being added.  Phishing is a little more sophisticated where an email can lead you to a website which is trying to get you to use your cc# or reveal personal information.

 

At the following  link(from harbott.com) I found major Internet business founding timeline – Yahoo,Ebay, google,Wikipedia,LinkedIn, myspace, skype, faebook, YouTube, Twitter, and some other up til 2007.

http://www.harbott.com/2012/05/04/visual-timeline-of-internet-milestones/

I have added the LAN – Firewall defense era. and more on the image from the Harbott.com visual image.

Notice that I added around yr 2006 the Defense of IPS/IDS – Intrusion Prevention Systems and Intrusion Detection Systems became better and less expensive. I know they were there before, but IPS systems were only for the truly large budget IT security departments.

The game changed around 2005 as this video states http://bcove.me/vchfpcni   I discussed on a post from 10/09/2014  http://oversitesentry.com/russian-criminal-website-taken-down-by-fbi/

2005 is when the hardcore criminals came into their own with their rising nationalism(Russian and Chinese) pushing them into better ways to collaborate using Internet community building forums and the like.  The great leap forward came when at the same  time Ebay and Facebook became global multi-billion dollar operations the criminals also did using similar technologies.

 

The Darknet or Darkweb are computers that are not reachable from Google for the most part. It is where the criminals talk among each other and use their skills to sell what they know and buy what they don’t have. which is why todays malware and attacks have ransomware that works so well to make 1000%  ROI Details at this link

http://oversitesentry.com/criminal-hackers-have-1000-roi-on-ransomware-exploits/

So Now it is 2015 with the latest construct for the defense the NGFW (Next Generation Firewall)

What this actually  is: a Firewall and an IPS system all in one which is trying to be stateless with up-to-date signatures thus can be a better defensive network than the machines using technologies from the 2000’s

 

But even with the latest techniques and technologies the attackers have the upper hand because they can pick and choose what to attack… Look at the latest :

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/11/49-busted-in-europe-for-man-in-the-middle-bank-attacks/

Europol nabbed 49 suspects across Europe:

{  The parallel investigations uncovered international fraud totaling €6 million (about £4.4 million or $6.8 million) – a haul that Europol says was snagged within a “very short time.”

The gang allegedly targeted medium and large European companies via MiTM attacks. The suspects allegedly used social engineering and managed to plant malware onto the targeted companies’ networks.  }

Check the rest of the article as the criminals used all the latest attacks used a fake website with javascript code to steal payment information with a highly sophisticated Man In The Middle(MitM) Attack.

The fake website actually used the target bank(Absa) own code to make the transaction, but allowed the criminal to use a portion of the transaction to steal just enough information to make millions of Euros in transactions.

So what can one do? Teach social engineering, installthe best anti-virus and anti-malware technologies that you can.

 

The criminals are geting more and more sophisticated, it would be nice if we got ahead of the curve for once.  this requires a new culture of IT security Defense.

Assuming you are hacked is better than assuming there is nothing wrong. Because if you assume you are hacked it makes one change and try to improve instead of being complacent. You also look at your network and computers within a different light. Look for the hackers as they are there.