Cyber sentinels: network security and co-location.

• Author: Stevenson, Brooks
• Position: Tech Knowledge

IMAGINE SOMEONE HAVING COMPLETE and total access to your company's data, to your network. Now imagine you're a credit union and that data consists of your member's Social Security numbers, their names and addresses, their account numbers and balances, and your own accounting system. Coupled with a little creativity, this information could easily be used to destroy not only your company, but also the financial wellbeing of thousands of clients.

It seems like a no-brainer that companies such as credit unions would take every precaution to prevent something like this from happening, but that's where you're wrong. A recent conversation with a network security professional revealed that one local credit union was taking just such a risk: "We made a visit to a potential client and found they had a personal computer running a 'sniffer' [a bug that scans your network] and a password cracker.

"The user of this computer had inadvertently downloaded these nasty bugs from a pop-up window or spam e-mail but had no idea they were running on this computer," says Jason Call, vice president of sales and marketing for local network security company Securitis. "We told the client about it, warned them of the inherent dangers of having their network exposed and suggested they rebuild the hard drive to eliminate the bugs. When we came back three months later, they had done nothing about it." Call adds, "We don't know to what extent they may have been affected, if at all, and neither do they. We may never know. You can't gamble with your own data, and no one has the resources to play Russian Roulette with other people's information--especially when it involves money."

Unfortunately, according to Call, this kind of phenomenon is not the exception to the rule; it has become more of a prevailing trend. Many businesses just aren't taking proper care of their networks and their data.

The CERT Coordination Center is a center of Internet security expertise, located at the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center operated by Carnegie Mellon University. Their information ranges from protecting systems against potential problems to reacting to current problems to predicting future problems. In 2002, CERT had more than 82,000 security incidents reported to the center. That's 225 incidents a day--and those are only the reported incidents.

Understanding the problem

As the business world has grown to rely more and more on information...