There have been a lot of revelations in the news over the weekend in relation to hacking trends and it appears that hacking is on the rise across all fronts.
It was revealed by Iain Lobban, director of British intelligence gathering facility, GCHQ, that the MoD had foiled over 1,000 cyber attacks last year from criminals and foreign intelligence services. Also last year the UK government announced an increase of £650 million for the cyber-defence budget, marking cyber-defence as an increasingly costly venture.
Mr Lobban also shared concerns that both our on-line taxation and benefits systems and private contractors could be at serious risk from cyber-attacks in the future and that general theft of Intellectual Property could have a serious impact on the UK economy.
We think perhaps in light of this, the government may wish to upgrade their systems away from Internet Explorer 6 in-line with the rest of the world, or are they hoping hackers will forget old security flaws as they move onto later revisions of software?
Over the weekend, Sky News also reported on a 46 per cent increase in smartphone hacking and with Bitdefender citing a 2,000 per cent increase in malicious applications for last year, with a prediction of a 6,000 per cent increase over the next six months. It appears that hacking in this market is not limited to just industrial saboteurs and government spies but also to concerned or over-zealous spouses with applications both dedicated to and marketed at tracking a partner's moves, phone calls and messages - all without any notification.
From an application standpoint, smartphones are secure devices and a smartphone owner must always accept and allow applications to access the various elements of their device. Applications are self-contained and so it's not possible for one application to access data from another, however like all devices running complex operating systems, security flaws will always be present. With devices often connected to the internet, they are frequently exposed to all the hacking risks that come with on-line access. The real gotcha is that we rarely think to protect our devices from the ones we trust and only a few of us keep our devices both passworded and keep those passwords completely private.
Facebook has announced that there are over 600,000 compromised logins to its service every single day, 0.06 per cent of daily login attempts across the service. These range from phishing attempts to malicious software, though an element of these figures are Facebook simply being proactive as it doubts the legitimacy of a login, such as a user legitimately connecting from a new location. This is perhaps a primary reason for Facebook's new Trusted Friends opt-in feature, where you are able to distribute unique codes to three to five friends. Should a user lose access to their account, either maliciously or not, they can recover these codes from their friends to regain access.
With the increase in system complexity, connectivity and unification of data, it's inherently more challenging to keep data secure and hackers know it. We ask all our readers here at HEXUS to be ever mindful of the security of their devices, accounts and passwords. Some simple tips:
- Don't use the same password for different websites unless absolutely sure of legitimacy and avoid this even if you are confident.
- Double-check that web-addresses read exactly as they should to avoid phishing.
- If available, use HTTPS secure links when entering confidential information, just try adding the S to an existing webpage if the option isn't presented to you.
- Use an up-to-date web browser with up-to-date plug-ins, currently Google Chrome has been shown to be the most secure.
- Password protect your devices and change the password from time-to-time.
- Don't open attachments in e-mails, ever, unless you're expecting to receive one. If you receive an unexpected attachment from a familiar contact, talk to them first to confirm that it was truly them that sent the e-mail.
- If a device or service is compromised, change the passwords on all inter-connecting services.
