A Year That Was!
2011 will go down in history as the year where cyber-criminals and ‘hacktivists’ shook governments and brought many businesses to their knees. 2011 will also go down in history as the year where, despite economic downturn, ecommerce grew by leaps and bounds. Here are some highlights from the globe:
lHackers stole nearly an million users’ credit card information from Stratfor Global Intelligence Services.
lLulzSec compromised Nintendo’s US Servers, Infragard (an IT service provider for the FBI), PBS and Fox.
lSony was attacked in May and more than 102 million user accounts were compromised.
lRSA was breached and more than 40 million SecurID tokens were compromised. Using the stolen RSA token information, Lockheed Martin, the largest IT services provider to U.S Government and military, was breached. This was soon followed by intrusions into other establishments such as L-3 Communications.
lChurches, national labs, space agencies and Governments of countries such as Australia and New Zealand were attacked. Even Her Majesty’s Treasury was not spared!
During this same year, internet commerce increased dramatically. For instance, according to ComScore, sales between November and Christmas grew 15% compared to same period last year. This greatly outpaced overall U.S. retail sales, which grew a paltry 3.8%. The week ending Dec 18, 2011 was the biggest week for online shopping in the history of e-commerce!
During this past holiday season, consumers, more than ever before, consulted their mobile devices to either search for better deals or check off items on their shopping list. But, as consumers increased their adoption of smart phones for shopping, the threat of security breaches also increased. In 2011 alone, mobile attackers stole more than a million dollars from non-iOS users, according to McAfee. iOS has remained relatively secure, for now, with no reported cases of malware on iPhones that aren’t jail broken. This is definitely a source of comfort because, according to RichRelevence, 92% of all mobile shopping in the US was done on iPhones and iPads during this holiday season.
A Year That’ll Be?
What can we anticipate in 2012? Amongst other things, with CBN’s cashless policy, we can surely anticipate an increase in ecommerce. In addition, the landing of more submarine cables in Nigeria with the resultant drop of bandwidth rates as well as the expansion of more fiber cable and wireless networks might see more businesses and homes getting connected to the Internet with access to a lot more bandwidth.
From a security perspective, Gartner predicts that cloud providers, including data management, infrastructure management and security will become top targets for hackers.
This is because the data center and cloud equipment contain critical data of a large number of users, making it worth the while for hackers. In Nigeria we have already seen the activities of the group named Naija Cyber Hactivists that during the “Occupy Nigeria” protest against the fuel subsidy removal. It has been speculated that several Nigerian websites including those of the Federal Ministry of Transport, EFCC and Dangote where compromised. Also, mobile banking activities provides another avenue for hackers both to the phones and mobile devices of customers as well as to the mobile banking operators.
McAfee predicts that 2012 will see more of spam, Trojan horses, and more importantly viruses targeted towards smartphones and tablets. Specifically, it points out that Hactivistics, ‘Anonymous’ and others will hack our phones for reasons altruistic or cruel. We, as consumers, will encounter more and more SMS fraud, botnets and malvertisements. Lookout, a US-based mobile security company, says that the criminal business of malware will be more profitable than ever before, as the possibility of monetizing mobile devices grows and the cost of infecting devices lessens.
What’s the way out for the customer?
Where there is problem, there is a solution!
Organizations and companies who are vulnerable to these security threats should look for solutions from companies that have a footprint in the network security space, such as Juniper Networks.
Gone are the days when companies just provided an on-ramp product to the Internet super highway. Instead, service providers and enterprise customers should opt to go with companies that provide the complete end-to-end solution – routers, switches, firewalls and the whole enchilada in between.
In this way, these customers will be looking to not only achieve lower TCOs or higher ARPUs, but also manageability (single software release, easy upgrade etc.) and interoperability. Juniper can secure the network end to end using its SRX gateways, IPSs, STRM series of security threat managers and Junos® Pulse secure clients.
This article was submitted by Layer3 (www.layer3.cc), a Juniper Network Elite Partner for EMEA.
