Stories about: Para-Protect

With the rapid increase in security breaches leaving law enforcement struggling to keep up, some organisation are taking the law into their own hands and punishing hackers themselves.

Para-Protect, a network security portal in Virginia, reports that 90 per cent of the security breaches its technicians work on are based on attacks from within

Dan Geer, CTO of @Stake Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., an Internet security company, hires hackers. So does Firas Bushnaq, president and CEO for eCompany in Aliso Viejo, Calif., an Internet solutions company. In fact, a growing number of security organizations are hiring hackers--people driven by an unquenchable desire to understand programmable systems and find the weaknesses in them.

Para-Protect Inc., a network security portal in Alexandria, Virginia, reports that 90 percent of the security breaches its technicians work on are based on attacks from within. Even more shocking is that upwards of 50 percent are caused by the company 's own network administrators.

All the hackers had to go on were five innocuous e-mail messages. Within four hours, they had taken control of their target's bank account, changed his password and locked him out. They had also acquired his credit card numbers, the details of his driving record and his salary to the penny. For the coup de grce, they infiltrated his office and left a puckish note on his desk: "Hi Matt, from your friends at Jaws."

If your company counts on the Web for any form of commerce, I'll bet your marketing department is still breathing down your neck asking if you're safe from distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. Well, you can tell them that while there's no foolproof solution, there are steps you can take to prevent becoming a victim of - or an unwitting co-conspirator in - such attacks.

If an Internet giant like Yahoo can be crippled for a few hours from a denial of service attack, is any Web site or Web service truly safe from a similar type of directed assault?

On a crisp, sunny November day in the nation's capital, in the sparsely furnished second-floor office of Para-Protect, "Bob the hacker" hunches over his monitor and fires off Unix command lines in short, machine gun blasts.

The threat of online assaults had IT staffs on guard, but midnight came and went without any serious security problems cropping up, according to experts monitoring systems.