Low-Tech Attack Vector Highly Successful
An article review.
Visual Hacking proves to be extremely effective
A recent study conducted by the Ponemon Institute involved some simple experimentation with some alarming results. The researchers showed up as temporary employees at 43 offices operated by 7 large corporations. The corporations had originally agreed to be part of the research. Additionally, management knew these “employees” were coming, while the office staff did not.
The researchers were not overtly secret in their attempts to obtain sensitive information. They took pictures of computer screens, blatantly took documents with “confidential” classification by picking them up and stashing them in their purse or briefcase. They spent up to two hours in each office wandering around seeing what they could get.
The results were staggering. With a total of 43 trials, staff responded seven times when the researchers took pictures, four times when confidential documents were being taken, and only twice when the researchers were wandering around trying to find information. Then out of all those interactions, only one was actually reported to management. Yes, one!
Ultimately, this article highlights the immense need for companies of all sizes to adopt Infosec best practices. You wonder what the likelihood of a breach would be if you don’t? Read Dan’s New Leaf on The Adoption of Information Security.
Just as Dan highlights in The Magnificent Seven – 2015, the time to act is now. Targets are changing. Hackers will go after whoever they can, whenever they can, so do you know your risk?
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The above is what we call an “Article Review.” It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts. We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues. Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.” infotex does not intend to endorse views represented by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING. For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.
Original article by Maria Korolov of CSO.
