The\u00a0industrialization\u00a0of hacking means that everyone is a potential target in an industry estimated at\u00a0a $1 trillion,\u00a0according to Shlomo Kramer, president & CEO at US based security company, Imperva.<\/p>\n
Kramer spoke with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the motivation of computer hackers and the challenge of developing next generation internet security solutions on Bloomberg Television.<\/p>\n
See the bloomberg video here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n He noted that 20 years ago, hackers were about notoriety, \u201cit was ego driven, making sure they were very visible.<\/p>\n \u201cToday, attacks are really motivated, either by financial gain or political gain or going after intellectual property, so this is a very well organised crime industry that some estimate at a $1 trillion,\u201d the chief executive said.<\/p>\n When questioned if certain clients were more targeted than others, Kramer said: \u201cInitially we\u2019ve seen when we started a few years back, is that the larger organisations have been more the target of these types of attacks, so large banks, large telecommunication companies, etc.”<\/p>\n “But in the last few years, we\u2019ve seen industrialisation of this crime economy where it\u2019s not human beings behind these attacks, these are global networks of what is called bots, or automated attackers around the world that are targeting everyone.<\/p>\n \u201cSo today we see that everyone can be the target of these types of attacks, even the smallest organisation. This is a very sophisticated economy that has all the characteristics of a mature industrialised economy,\u201d\u00a0Kramer said.<\/p>\n He said there were very sophisticated groups of programmers, and people who distributed the software, creating mass networks of bots around the world, with people in turn, selling the networks, and people who used them to penetrate organisations.<\/p>\n Further down the chain existed people who sold the stolen data to others who used the information for identity theft and other types of criminal activity.<\/p>\n He described the security industry as similar to Alice in Wonderland\u2019s \u2018Red Queen Race\u2019. \u201cYou need to run as fast as you can in order to stay in one place and keep up with the innovation of the bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n Kramer\u00a0highlighted the importance of protecting against “new types of threat”. He said that more than 70% of data being lost by organisations was being lost through new ways associated with data centres.<\/p>\n He said his staff and research team included \u201cwhite hat hackers\u201d or hackers who had previously worked for financial institutions and government organisations, trying to hack into their systems (with their permission), in order find vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n Related article<\/strong><\/p>\n Online social networks and data security<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Beware: bank-hacking software getting more sophisticated<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n