How often does Hackers try to hit SA companies?

is there a database of these kind of threats ..

2 answers

1 - most companies dont know when theyve been hit
2 - most companies wont release that information, weather the attempt was successful or not.

I had a meeting with a defense and aerospace company from the States. Its actually scary as to how many local companies do not take electronic espionage seriously. But then again, they had these biometric flash drives thats been encrypted by the Borg...and he said that you are as secure as what your budget allows....so poor = hacked. How many companies thats not IT savvy you know thats willing to spend millions on intrusion detection and prevention?

south african companies do not focus enough on threats. However our biggest causes of financial loss are phishing and other forms of identity theft. full-on hacking as in access control breaches from the Net itself do occur but I doubt are very high. Attempts, of course, are very high - but also given that some if not most of these are automated these days. checking for vulnerabilities that could be exploited.

as mentioned, not many companies, in fact none will release those stats. It can be misrepresented as a sign of poor management and/or security practices. Even if in some this is actually the case.

Me. said:

I had a meeting with a defense and aerospace company from the States. Its actually scary as to how many local companies do not take electronic espionage seriously. But then again, they had these biometric flash drives thats been encrypted by the Borg...and he said that you are as secure as what your budget allows....so poor = hacked. How many companies thats not IT savvy you know thats willing to spend millions on intrusion detection and prevention?

Click to expand...

i disagree a bit with this, you are as unsecure as the services you allow and policies you have in place.
Sure, having money makes things easier but being a relatively "poor" company does not mean you have to sacrifice security. You just have to work a little harder...

"How often do hackers..."

Script Kiddies

When I had a leased circuit to Verizon/MTN we had at least a few attempts per day of people trying to gain access to our servers that were live on the Internet. That was just on the ssh login, ports-scanning was even more.

All the attempts were these little f!@#ing script kiddies that want to break in a use the server to break into another server, and so forth and so forth.

We did a few tests. We put a Linux server outside our firewall and used a root / root, user / password combo. The server usually won’t last more than an hour or so.

We put a win98 box live on the Internet and that was even more spectacular 30 minutes was the max survival time, but that was usually virus attacks that gets in.

So true industrial espionage attacks will be less than what you see in the movies. Well, unless there is something that they want, like the recipe to Mrs. Balls ....