This week was full of technical events, but the security news was the most spreading ones so that I thought I have to stop and discuss a little bit.
The first event was the stories coming from different big companies that got hacked. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft are the major ones we know about up till now. NBC.com the site was also hit by a malware. According to AllThingsD, “many other companies could have been infected by the malware-spreading site, and perhaps many more will disclose similar instances of hacking in the coming weeks”.
Also we got the news about Zendesk, the major PaaS provider for Tumblr, Pintreset and Twitter (CNN). Few hours after that Microsoft Azure services faced a major outage believed to be related to the attack attempts on the company that occurred before (LA Times).
What all that means? Is there a cyber-war going on in the background. Is it really a China-America war? Chinese army denied the reports talking about group of hackers working for it. No one knows what is going on, more weird news we read this week was the Anonymous Group twitter account hacked! (BBC).
What all that should mean to us?
– No one is secure: All the big tech players, and even the black hats! So what about us? How are we protected? Is nowadays following the best practices enough?
– The cloud is still a risky place with many questions about its security to be answered.
– With all the advancement in the testing and penetration tools, we still have weak codes in term of security.
What is next?
Should things continue the same way that is enough reason to ring the bells, even I think that we must be in the after crisis period now. It is a challenging moment where everyone is responsible. But how we should act? I would like to discuss this with other experts so the knowledge got spread and we can have a base from which we can build.
References:
http://allthingsd.com/20130222/microsoft-hacked-just-like-facebook-and-apple/
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-microsoft-hack-azure-20130222,0,6681241.story
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21532858
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/22/tech/pinterest-hacked/index.html