Learning the art and practice of cyber-defense

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/learning-the-art-and-practice-of-cyber-defense/

By David Shamah
The Times of Israel
July 25, 2013

Every single network protection system, even the most sophisticated, has 
chinks in its armor. The proof, said Comsec CEO Moshe Ishai, is that his 
company’s new security stress testing system, the Comsimulator, was 
successful in breaching the defenses of 100 percent of systems tested for 
resistance to DDOS (distributed denial of service) cyber-attacks, in which 
hackers inundate a site with traffic in order to overload it and shut it 
down.

"The sites in question belong to large financial institutions, government 
agencies, and others that spent millions of dollars to ensure that their 
sites could withstand attacks," said Ishai. "Our simulated attacks 
subjected those sites to the kinds of attacks they could expect from 
sophisticated government-sponsored hackers who are using the latest tools 
and methods to attack."

What’s true for the relatively crude DDOS attacks is also true for the 
more sophisticated social engineering hack attacks, in which employees of 
an organization click on suspicious links and install viruses and Trojans 
that turn their networks into components of botnets, the underground 
networks used to send spam and launch cyber attacks (including DDOS 
attacks). The bottom line is that even organizations that have spent a 
fortune on protecting their computer systems aren’t protected.

This is what war is like, said Ishai -- painful, expensive, and full of 
uncertainty. "The number of cyber-attacks today is absurd, and they are 
only increasing," said Ishai at a press conference introducing 
Comsimulator, probably the toughest security testing system ever devised. 
"There’s always something you haven’t thought of in cyber-defense, and 
Comsimulator is designed to help organizations figure out what they may 
have missed."

[...]

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