A server needs to be carefully managed for its resources, to ensure the highest performance and operational efficiency. Your web server is no exception to this rule.
The experienced team at DOSarrest, DDoS mitigation and internet security experts, have been helping clients defend against DDoS attacks for years. They have had the opportunity to analyze hundreds of websites, and have discovered an alarming number of vulnerabilities and inefficient coding. They have seen insecure web applications exposed by hackers, bringing sites down with just one web transaction. They have also seen web servers unable to deliver while under legitimate load due to something as simple as improper CSS and cache settings. And with the constant changes introduced by developers, managed hosting providers and website administrators, security holes and suboptimal web coding are almost guaranteed to appear over time and can then be exploited by internet criminals and pranksters.
A 2008 SQLi breach compromised 130 million credit and debit cards and cost Heartland Payment Systems at least $140 million1. In 2011 a single hack cost Sony over $170 million2. More than 8 million usernames, emails and encrypted passwords were stolen from Gamigo during a hacking incident in 2012, and publicly shared3. In recent years, hackers have been generating real concern and attracting serious media attention with the colossal amount of damage they have been able to cause. We read almost daily about how another organization’s data was compromised by a hacker, with greater financial and political implications each time.
But hacking is not new. One of the earliest documented examples of a hack was in 1903, when disgruntled magician and inventor Nevil Maskelyne interfered with John Ambrose Fleming’s wireless telegraph demonstration by hacking and sending insults and rude poems4. His hack did then what hacks still do today: it exploited a flaw in the system to inflict damage. In the case of the wireless telegraph incident, the damage was done to reputations and didn’t prove significantly expensive. In today’s world where billions of dollars worth of business intelligence is available online, the damage can potentially be far worse.
Whatever their particular flavour of havoc, all hackers play the same game: they create tools that exploit weaknesses in systems, and then use the internet to access those systems. What they do from there is limited only by their imagination: extracting customer data to sell to competitors; mounting a DDoS attack to take a site offline; inserting a virus to destroy systems and data; retrieving proprietary information to use for their own benefit. The possibilities for how to inflict damage on an organization are endless.
1 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9176507/Heartland_breach_expenses_pegged_at_140M_so_far
2 www.networkworld.com/news/2011/052311-playstation-network-hack-will-cost.htm
3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/07/23/eight-million-passwords-spilled-from-gaming-site-gamigo-months-after-breach/
4 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228440.700-dotdashdiss-the-gentleman-hackers-1903-lulz.html?page=1
