Fergie's Tech Blog

Under Siege in Dulles By New-Generation Hackers

Leslie Walker writes in The Washington Post:

"We used to feel like the cat playing with the mouse," recalled Aristotle Balogh, senior vice president at VeriSign Inc., a company that oversees some of the Internet's critical functions. "Now we feel more like the mouse, trying to be fast enough because the attackers are becoming much more like the cat."

Balogh provided a gloomy account of the hacker wars two weeks ago when I visited VeriSign's global network operations center in Dulles. VeriSign considers 2004 "the turning point" in the conflict, Balogh explained, because the bad guys exhibited such dramatic leaps in creativity, sophistication and focus.

His assessment was underscored Tuesday when International Business Machines Corp. released a report saying "criminal-driven security attacks" jumped 50 percent in the first half of this year compared with last year. IBM's global security intelligence team detected more than 237 million security attacks worldwide in the first six months, including 54 million against governments, 36 million against manufacturers and 34 million against financial services.

To keep criminal hackers at bay, VeriSign, keeper of the master Internet address book, has been throwing mind-boggling amounts of money and computing firepower at security.

posted by Fergie @ 8/04/2005 06:15:00 AM