Hackers take summer breaks and reserve the winter holiday
season for most of their exploits, but fewer than a quarter are
motivated by money or malicious intent, according to a study of
hacker behaviour.
A survey of 79 hackers' habits conducted by
Tufin Technologies at last
month's Defcon hacker
convention in Las Vegas showed that 81% were more active during
the winter holidays. Christmas was the best time to engage in
corporate hacking for 56%, and 25% preferred New Year's Eve.
Almost 90% said summer would have little impact on their hacking
activities, even though many IT professionals took a break
then.
Michael Hamelin, Tufin Technologies' chief security architect,
said, "Hackers know winter is when people relax and let their hair
down, and many organisations run on a skeleton staff."
The survey showed that 52% of hackers do their business during
weekday evenings, 32% during work hours (weekdays), with just 15%
hacking on weekends.
Seven out of 10 respondents said compliance with regulations to
implement privacy, security and process controls had made no
difference to their chances of hacking into a corporate network. Of
the rest, 15% said compliance activities had made hacking more
difficult, but 15% said they had made it easier.
Hamelin said standards such as PCI-DSS provided a good baseline,
but they were not enough. Several PCI-DSS compliant firms had been
hacked, with
Network Solutions merely the latest high-profile case.
70% of respondents believed that fewer than a quarter of hackers
broke into IT systems for financial or malicious motives.
Few were put off by the millions a company spent on its IT
security. The survey found that 86% of respondents' felt they could
hack into a network via the firewall; a quarter believed they could
do so within minutes, 14% within a few hours.
Hamelin said, "Poorly configured firewalls remain a significant
risk for many organisations. It is not the technology that is at
fault, but rather the configuration and change control processes
that are neglected or missing altogether. Best practice suggests
you should test and review your firewall configuration regularly,
but many organisations fail to do so."