Friday, 3 May 2013

Chinese Takeaway InfoSec Style

The Chinese and other foreign powers are said to be hacking and stealing information from UK businesses on an industrial scale, worst still is most businesses have no inkling their IT systems and information are compromised. Government agencies, the UK public sector and any businesses connected to providing services to the UK national infrastructure are primary targets of certain foreign nation states, which literally have military squads of trained hackers with their cyber sights on the UK. It is said they petty much target all of the UK FTSE 100 companies.

These covert attacks do not only probe for IT weakness for future cyber warfare, but have a data theft agenda to them, targeting corporate secrets, sales projections, organisational structures and even customer contact databases. The aim here is to give foreign nation state backed businesses a competitive advantage over UK businesses, and to mimic successful UK businesses.



With some businesses in the UK, taking this threat serious enough is a major hurdle to overcome, without having evidence you can put yourself in danger of being laughed out of the boardroom. But this is no James Bond fantasy or an opening chapter of a Tom Clancy novel, just read the reports by the UK Government's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), it becomes clear the UK security services are well aware of the problem, perhaps they are doing the same thing back. http://www.cpni.gov.uk