Akamai Government Forum 2014: Threat Landscape
The Akamai Government Forum 2014: Threat Landscape event helped customers dive deep into the efficiencies of moving to the cloud and innovations in cybersecurity. Some of the featured speakers were Aneesh Chopra, the first and former Chief Technology Officer of the United States (he spoke at our GovDefenders event) , Tom Leighton CEO of Akamai, and Casey Coleman, Client Executive VP of AT&T.
Our very own CTO Van Ristau spoke during the “Threat Landscape” breakout panel. The two other participants were R.H. Powell, Director of the Service line for Akamai’s Government Services and Mike McGee, the Director of Security and Risk Management for Concur.
Below are the two questions I found most interesting along with summarized answers given by R.H. and Mike.
One of the main questions was, “Are cyber threats truly increasing or are we just better at collecting metrics?”
R.H.: The short answer is that they are increasing, because of the growth of internet traffic. 60% of online credit card usage has been compromised. The attacks are getting through with success and the problem is growing.
Mike: As the attacks are growing the hackers are taking advantage of people/agencies that are behind the curve. People are lazy and so are hackers. They are going to take the path of least resistance.
Are there differences among the threats to federal, state, and local government compared to commercial threats and threats to individuals?
R.H.: There are differences but the tools used to secure the threat are the same. If you’re a government agency you need to focus on your important information and the PII of the users that are signing up, but when you’re commercial the risk of IP is very high. The extortion attempts have increased on these companies saying that if you don’t pay the hackers they won’t stop attacking. If you’re an individual they are trying to steal your information (credit cards, social security, ect).
Mike: You have a lot of different attackers out there including the people who are just bored. They are always just looking for a challenge. All the attacks are similar, but it’s just the resources that people are putting towards them. Two years ago we were only getting 100,000 security events a day. Now we are up to 2.5 million. When your profile goes up you will start attracting more and more attackers.
Agencies and companies are spending a lot of time and effort to move their systems into the digital age, but the lack of IT security is making them vulnerable to attacks.
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