The government is more worried about political, economic
and technical espionage than terrorists when it comes to
cyberattacks, the government'sCentre for the Protection
of the National Infrastructure (CPNI)revealed
last week.
A spokesman for CPNI said the centre was particularly concerned
that cyberspies were using social engineering tricks to persuade
people to give them sensitive data, circumventing IT security
systems.
According to reports, the
CPNI has written to 300 top businesses warning that Chinese
hackers are particularly active and to take special precautions
against them.
In a speech to journalists in November, the director general of
MI5, Jonathan Evans, said, "Despite the Cold War ending nearly two
decades ago, my service is still expending resources to defend the
UK against unreconstructed attempts by Russia, China and others to
spy on us. A number of countries continue to devote considerable
time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on
civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and
economic intelligence at our expense.
"They do not only use traditional methods to collect
intelligence but increasingly deploy sophisticated technical
attacks, using the internet to penetrate computer networks.
"It is a matter of some disappointment to me that I still have
to devote significant amounts of equipment, money and staff to
countering this threat. They are resources which I would far rather
devote to countering the threat from international terrorism - a
threat to the whole international community, not just the UK.
Security software house
McAfee warned last week that it expected industrial espionage
to be the major threat to businesses in the coming year, Some 120
countries are testing one anothers' network and database defences,
it said.
Speaking at the launch of the annual
Sans Institute report on the top 20 threats to IT last week, a
spokesman for CPNI said defending against social engineering
attacks was difficult because it required users to have a balance
between naivete and cynicism.
A spokesman for CPNI said attackers often pretended to be in
authority over the victim, and used tricks such as threatening to
fire them. In a likes and similarities attack, the attacker
pretended to see the victim as a kindred spirit and groomed
them.
A reciprocation attack involves "doing favours" for each other,
and a social validation attack uses the approach that "your friend
or boss did me this favour, please will you help me". Scarcity
attacks put pressure on the victim to rush them into insecure
behaviour.
Awareness and training were good defences, but a spokesman
for CPNI said people need to practise to overcome their shyness in
confronting requests for insecure acts.
"There are also times when an attacker can exploit your actions
even when you are just doing you job," he said. "This can happen
when you feel you are just a cog in a broken machine," he said.