Peter Benson, chief executive of Auckland-based consultancy Security-assessment.com, has expressed disbelief towards the fact that New Zealand‘s Government IT systems were attacked by the state of China.
He has stated that due to the complicated nature of nowadays e-crime it is nearly impossible to find the perpetrators, who sometimes use 5 or 10 different servers in different countries to stage an attack. Trying to find out whether it was backed by a government would add even more complexity to the whole problem
The only evidence, if it can be called evidence, is an IP adress which is based in China, however, the only thing it shows is that countries in their stage of development are frequently used as mediums for e-attacks, due to the fact that technology is deployed at a very rapid pace in these countries, often without time to have decent security prepared beforehand.
“We have seen this in previous years, with attacks coming from Korea and other countries, and it appears to be directly related to the notion that the bad guys from anywhere are using the ‘easy ingress’ points from which to stage attacks,” he told Computerworld last week.
According to Symantec’s security research leader, Vincent Weafer, there is no proof that hackers started targeting governments in particular, but rather any online organization, therefore the growing number of attacks against governments is due to the fact that a bigger number of them have become active online in recent years.
Benson tends to agree with this viewpoint and says that the vast majority of online attacks are commercially as opposed to politically motivated.
September 25th, 2007 at 3:40 pm How About the attker’s source IP from military sponsored Lab, and the tool used by hacker signed militray develope team number? What kind of hacker ‘always’ start daily work at 07:00 AM? and take a break at 12. Quite ab-normal to a hacker..