Beware of disgruntled employees

Hactivists, and others intent on sabotage such as disgruntled employees, are expanding their tactics beyond Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. So warns Dell SecureWorks’ Enterprise Brand and Executive Threat Surveillance team . The IT firm Dell says that its team is monitoring social media sites, forums, and other public information sources, looking for conversations and other indicators that a customer’s brand or its executives might be the target of a cyber-attack. The team has worked on numerous cases where they have obtained solid intelligence of a planned attack. Dell SecureWorks has then worked with the organisations, its customers, to shut down the attack before it could happen or made counter-measures to block the attack.

Rick Hayes, Sr. Manager, Security and Risk Consulting for Dell SecureWorks, said: “Unfortunately, in today’s attack climate, if you are an organisation which is likely to be a target of hacktivism and you do not have an intelligence team monitoring the Internet on your behalf, you have to be prepared for far more than just one attack strategy. The cyber campaigns being launched by hacktivists today aren’t merely consisting of a Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (where large amounts of Internet traffic are directed at a website in hopes of knocking it offline). But rather, we are seeing hackers launch a barrage of different cyber-attacks at their target including everything from DDoS attacks to website defacements, web application attacks, and spear phishing attacks looking to steal valuable customer and employee data to the hijacking of corporate Twitter credentials.”