Social Engineering

Hackers are adapting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and combining these with social engineering tactics to try and infiltrate banks during 2013, warns Gartner.

Enterprise information security in Australia could come under much greater scrutiny with the nation’s Information Commissioner looking to drill down deeply into the details of an organisation’s security practices after a breach.

In this series, Computerworld Australia examines some of the information security threats facing small businesses and larger enterprises today. We’ve looked at internal negligence and continue the series by speaking to experts about the problem of social engineering.

I had the opportunity to speak at a new security conference last week, Security Threats 2012. I presented on the topic of balancing business benefits with risks in the cloud (more on that later), but the event touched on a wide range of pertinent IT topics, provoking stimulating discussions of some of the most pressing challenges business leaders are facing.

A decade ago, most viruses and worms were unleashed by curious students, pranksters and punks wanting to see what kind of damage they could inflict. That quickly evolved into criminals and thieves writing most of the malware once they realized money could be made.