One of the problems with making the transitions from an agricultural to an industrial economy is that often the electronic infrastructure is lacking the proper defences that could shield it from rogue attacks from criminal enterprises and other ill intentioned hackers.
Lately, Asia Pacific countries have experienced a number of hacking attacks by both activist groups, such as Anonymous, and other more sinister parties.
Australia, the Philippines and Singapore were all victims of Anonymous cyber attacks.
The latest touched very close to the inner core of the government in Singapore, where Prime MInister Lee Hsien Loong's official website was diverted by Anonymous. The website was purposely expressing the Prime Minister's willingness to spare no measure to bring technology center hackers to justice, when the website was disabled.
Cloud computing and the immense numbers of users and devices is making the task of tracking the marauders much more difficult.
But these Asian government's vulnerability highlights something much more dangerous. It shows to criminal organizations that if Anonymous can get in, so can they, and the former can do a lot more damage to the infrastructure and economy of a country than Anonymous can.
Besides critical infrastructure, are even more important and vital military secrets, which could be easily hacked.
And it seems the hackers have taken notice of the vulnerability of the Asia Pacific countries and are setting their sights on them. Attacks have increased by 25% in just one year.
According to an expert, "information security has dramatically evolved, but security strategies have not kept pace."
One of the problem is that Asian businesses are not investing enough money in security upgrades.
While China and Russia are catching up pretty quickly to the problem, India is still lagging behind. China in fact, is probably the better protected of all the Asian countries.
Source : France 24/ 11.09.13
No comments:
Post a Comment