Hackers Take Summers Off Too

Tufin Technologies, a provider of Security Lifecycle Management solutions, has announced the findings of its “Hacker Habits” survey conducted among 79 hackers attending DEFCON 17 in Las Vegas earlier this month. “Enjoy your summer vacation,” said the hacking community, as you’re far less likely to be targeted now than during your Christmas and New Year’s vacation. Eighty-nine percent of hackers admitted that IT professionals taking a summer vacation would have little impact on their hacking activities, as a whopping 81 percent revealed they are far more active during the winter holidays with 56 percent citing Christmas as the best time to engage in corporate hacking and 25 percent specifically naming New Year’s Eve.

“The survey reveals that the Christmas and New Year holidays are popular with hackers targeting western countries,” said Michael Hamelin, chief security architect, Tufin Technologies. “Hackers know this is when people relax and let their hair down, and many organizations run on a skeleton staff over the holiday period.”

If you want to know when you should be most on your guard, it’s during weekday evenings, with 52 percent stating that this is when they spend most of their time hacking, 32 percent during work hours (weekdays), and just 15 percent hacking on weekends.

Ninety-six percent of hackers in the survey said it doesn’t matter how many millions a company spends on its IT security systems, it’s all a waste of time and money if the IT security administrators fail to configure and watch over their firewalls. Eighty-six percent of respondents’ felt they could successfully hack into a network via the firewall; a quarter believed they could do so within minutes, 14 percent within a few hours. Sixteen percent wouldn’t hack into a firewall even if they could.

“This may be stating the obvious,” said Hamelin, “but poorly configured firewalls remain a significant risk for many organizations. It’s not the technology that’s at fault, but rather the configuration and change-control processes that are neglected or missing altogether. Best practice suggests you should test and review your firewall configuration regularly, but many organizations fail to do so.”

Validating the frustrating gap between compliance and security, 70 percent of the hackers interviewed don’t feel that regulations introduced by governments worldwide to implement privacy, security and process controls has made any difference to their chances of hacking into a corporate network. Of the remaining 30 percent, 15 percent said compliance initiatives have made hacking more difficult and 15 percent believe they’ve made it easier.

“These results further validate the reality that there is little common ground between compliance and security, but as an industry we have the collective knowledge and the resources to change that,” said Hamelin. “As the media constantly reminds us, while standards such as PCI-DSS provide a good baseline, organizations that assume achieving PCI compliance will solve their security woes are in for a rude awakening. With security and compliance budgets so deeply intertwined, it serves us as security professionals to make the two more synonymous. At the end of the day, the more accountable we are willing to be, the less we’ll have to be.”

With the Network Solutions breach being the latest in a series of widely reported breaches of PCI compliant companies, how big is the threat of a high-profile malicious hack? One important factor in determining that is to understand the scope of criminal activity.

Seventy percent of those sampled believe the number of malicious hackers – criminals motivated by economic gain – is less then 25 percent of the of hacker community.