As companies, public bodies and individuals implement technology for the storage and transfer of private personal data more and more, access to that data increases exponentially.
At first glance, i thought this was about mucus and germs I think that the 'leakage' of inside (OS) information has increased to those with a mind and ability to exploit it, and therefore the instances have increased. I might be misguided, but it seems to me that despite the seemingly many platforms/softwares/OS's etc, we are headed for one big homogenised system in the not too far future.
are we starting to lose the war against the cyber criminals?
No.
It's merely a reflection of the fact that many places pay lip service to electronic security and fail to allocate sufficient budget and resource to it. Many people think all you need to do is throw a black box (e.g. a firewall) at it and all will be fine.
It's also partially to do with the poor state of IT development, security is often reactive rather than proactive, especially with the move to buzz word development methodologies such as "agile development" which advocates speed of delivery of code over traditional slower formalised processes that involve defined design steps.
The British hacker who apparently managed to get into the Pentagon's systems "looking for evidence of UFO's", was said to have initially tried entering "PASSWORD" when prompted to enter one, which was allegedly successful in some cases! This seems to suggest that some staff were too lazy to think up secure passwords. If this really did happen as the media suggested, then such incredibly sloppy attitudes are equivalent to simply leaving all doors unlocked, and it's no wonder the cousins were so incensed (and embarrassed).
It's merely a reflection of the fact that many places pay lip service to electronic security and fail to allocate sufficient budget and resource to it. Many people think all you need to do is throw a black box (e.g. a firewall) at it and all will be fine.
It's also partially to do with the poor state of IT development, security is often reactive rather than proactive, especially with the move to buzz word development methodologies such as "agile development" which advocates speed of delivery of code over traditional slower formalised processes that involve defined design steps.
Exackerly.
And add in the issue that 604DX brought up called pee-poor passwords and you can see how many attacks are made possible.
Also, the use of software like windows does make things easier too (although I mostly use windows and I don't think I've been hacked), whereas the use of Linux is more secure.
I think that the 'leakage' of inside (OS) information has increased to those with a mind and ability to exploit it, and therefore the instances have increased. I might be misguided, but it seems to me that despite the seemingly many platforms/softwares/OS's etc, we are headed for one big homogenised system in the not too far future.
