Roger Rawlinson, managing director of Assurance Division at NCC Group plc, comments on the alleged denial of service attacks that are thought to have impacted MasterCard and PayPal.
This coordinated backlash from WikiLeaks supporters group,‘Anonymous’, charts the growing use of cyber attacks as a weapon to make political statements by attempting to embarrass large organisations.
However, these are more commonly seen against political groups or government websites, rather than blue chip companies.
In canceling their contracts with WikiLeaks through political pressure, the companies are thought to have become the targets of hacktivism – one of the fastest growing uses for cyber crime.
Others that have canceled contracts or severed ties with WikiLeaks would do well to review the robustness of their websites and review their security strategies as quickly as possible.
The distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) used by the ‘Anonymous’ group inundate websites with user page requests so that the targets become unable to handle the load, and crash as a result.
The hackers are distributing further links to their network of supporters to further strengthen the attack by encouraging more page requests.
DDoS attacks are extremely difficult to combat. However, in this case, the group has indicated that the attacks are intended to force the companies into spending more on website load provision rather than crash the sites.
By Roger Rawlinson
Managing director of Assurance Division
NCC Group plc
www.nccgroup.com
