Phishing scams 'likely to target corporate info soon'

Phishing scams 'likely to target corporate info soon' - Breaking - theage.com.au:

By Sam Varghese

Phishing scams will continue to flourish but their focus will change: they will increasingly target corporate information, the Asia-Pacific vice-president of one of the world's premier security company says.

Richard Turner of RSA Security said the current rash of phishing scams was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg and those who were perpetrating them would turn to the more lucrative field of stealing business secrets.

'Australian businesses are rapidly opening their networks to remote users, be they employees who want to work from home, customers or those from other companies who share information. As soon as you do this, you need to apply good policy to information systems and business systems,' said Turner, who has been with RSA for the last eight years.

'Once this stage is reached, the need to implement well-configured software becomes paramount, in order to provide protection against unauthorised connections.'

RSA derives its name from three researchers at MIT - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman - who formulated the first algorithm for implementation of public key cryptography along with digital signatures.

Turner said the increased incidence of break-ins was in large measure due to a lack of real skills among security professionals. 'Security is a relatively new field; traditionally, it was the domain of those from the mainframe and Unix background and not the most fashionable of areas,' he said.

'The basic tools for breaking in are more readily available on the internet these days and relatively easy to get' hence the class of person who could effect such a compromise did not need to be a security expert."

COMMENT:
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Corporate espionage is not a new threat to the enterprise, the tools and incidents have changed. I wonder how RSA handles the prevention of Intellectual Property going out the door each evening on employees key rings. All 512MB on a Cruzer Titanium USB Flash Drive. See Sanddisk