http://fcw.com/articles/2011/08/08/home-page-tech-briefing-apt-cybersecurity.aspx By John Zyskowski FCW.com Aug 10, 2011 Unlike in politics, it’s rather important in the world of cybersecurity that words and labels mean something specific. Routinely mislabeling hacking and other incidents of computer mischief could lead to overreactions to garden-variety illicit activity or a tendency to downplay the need for a new kind of response to truly dangerous threats. For example, many experts cringe at how loosely the term “cyber war” is thrown around when a foreign state is the suspected culprit behind a hack or information theft from a government computer. The more accurate label for those kinds of cases is espionage, and that falls well short of an act that justifies retaliation via cruise missile. On the flip side, experts fear that agency officials might get lulled into a false sense of security due to the misuse of the term “advanced persistent threat,” an increasingly popular label for a highly sophisticated and determined form of hacking — like the campaign that hit security vendor RSA and several defense contractors this past spring. One instructive example is the case of Stuxnet, the virus that infected industrial control equipment used by countries around the world and, most importantly, by Iran’s nuclear program. When news of the Stuxnet virus broke last summer, some security experts were reluctant to label it as APT, even though many in the press did so anyway. The virus was certainly advanced; it used an impressive array of hacking techniques, some of which were redundant in case certain tactics failed. [...] ___________________________________________________________ Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management, Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure. http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/Received on Thu Aug 11 2011 - 02:40:10 PDT
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