Strategic Security
Feeling vindicated? Security pros everywhere rejoiced when proof that external adversaries really are targeting companies to steal intellectual property led the 10 o'clock news. Government and military agencies have been dealing for years with these attacks, but cries for help from enterprise IT groups often fell on deaf ears.
Until January. That's when Google announced that for half of 2009 it was attacked using a zero-day Internet Explorer exploit originating in China. Other companies, including Adobe, Juniper and Rackspace, said they were also targeted with same techniques during that same period.
Dubbed "Operation Aurora" by McAfee, this wide-ranging cyber assault attempted to steal the source code of applications developed by these--and possibly other--leading vendors.
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Strategic Security
About the Author
Michael A. Davis is the CEO of Savid Technologies, a technology and security consulting firm based in Chicago, and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. Michael is also a contributing author of Hacking Exposed, the No. 1 text on hacker methodology, and the new Hacking Exposed: Malware and Rootkits.
He is a senior member of the HoneyNet project, where he is working to develop data and network control mechanisms for Windows-based honeynets. Michael is an active developer in the open source community and has ported many popular network security applications to the Windows platform, including snort, honeyd, dsniff, and ngrep. He has spoken at several conferences around the world, including Defcon, CanSecWest, Toorcon and MISTI, as well as to local groups.
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