Sony got nuked, said one security expert. But it’s hardly the only attack aimed at a major corporation. Tens of thousands of cyber attacks are launched every second – a majority of which are directed at the United States – but few have the impact that can force a Hollywood studio to cancel a film.
“There’s really no other word for it,” said Kurt Stammberger, a security expert and vice president for marketing at Norse, a cyber security firm specializing in live attack intelligence. “What’s happening at Sony is really the nightmare scenario for every organization.”
The Northern California-based company, which provides live intelligence data to companies such as HP, has an interactive map of cyber attacks on its website where users can watch the action as its happening.
“It’s a little bit like the weather – it comes and goes in storms and bursts,” said Stammberger.
Except, unlike the weather, the attacks, represented by streaks of colored lines, is only one tenth of one percent of all cyber attacks. The whole map would be covered if it were to show every attack, so a random sample is all that’s shown.
Norse is able to come up with this data by placing more than eight million bait computers, or what they call “honeypots,” in 167 different data centers and 47 different countries where they’re attacked by hackers who think the bait machines hold credit card numbers or other sensitive information.
While the continuous barrage of cyber attacks makes for an engaging map that looks more like a hacker version of the board game Risk, it highlights how pervasive cyber crime and cyber attacks are in this day and age when megabytes if not gigabytes of our own personal information and financial records are stored and collected in servers where we can’t attest to its level of protection.
Thankfully, it’s not just defense for the good guys. See the mysterious node object on the map in the ocean just southwest of Africa? It’s not a ship or even an island full of hackers unleashing attacks. The node represents attacks launched on the offensive by the U.S. government, placed in the ocean to shield the location of where the attack is originating. The exact location: classified.
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