Critical Infrastructure Systems Often Targeted for Identity Theft Security Breaches, Says Article
Information and technology companies that handle important security measures regarding energy, transportation, and other critical infrastructure needs are increasingly under attack from cyber criminals carrying out online identity theft, according to an identity theft articlereleased Thursday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to the study - which was commissioned by McAfee Inc. - 54 percent of the 600 IT and security executives at "critical infrastructure enterprises" in 14 different countries said they had dealt with "large-scale denial of service attacks by high level [adversaries] like organized crime, terrorists or nation-state."
The same amount of respondents admitted to having to deal with widespread "stealthy infiltration" malware attack techniques by large-scale spy rings attempting to control large amounts of a country's confidential data in an identity theft breach.
"The networks of the companies and other enterprises that own and operate critical infrastructures worldwide are under frequent large-scale attacks," Shaun Waterman, a writer and researcher at CSIS who co-authored the article on identity theft, told NextGov.com. "You could describe what we're facing now as a cyber cold war, but to the respondents to this survey the cyber war has already started."
The survey also found that many cyber attacks looking to steal information were not orchestrated by petty criminals, but instead had been planned by other countries. Fifty-nine percent of those surveyed believed their country had seen attempts to infiltrate their networks by other countries and foreign government representatives.
Additionally, 29 percent reported that large-scale distributed denial of service attacks against their systems - which use networks of infected computers to slam networks with fake requests to compromise them - occurred multiple times every month, while 64 percent said that the identity theft breach attacks "impacted operations in some way."
Among the ways in which respondents saw the most hope for improving their means of security to prevent identity theft breaches in the future were to improve the ways news about potential online identity theft threats were spread in order to broaden awareness while also modifying older security systems to deal better with newer threats.
