Cyber attacks big threat to major firms

THE recent cyber attacks at Sony are just the latest in a increasingly long string of assaults on the databases of major firms across the globe.

On Thursday, hackers claimed to have compromised over one million passwords, email addresses and other information from SonyPictures.com.

In April, the company was forced to shut down some of its online services after the details of more than 100 million account holders were stolen.

The attacks are the latest in a string of breaches at Google and US defence contractor, Lockheed Martin.

A group of hackers, calling themselves Lulz Security, said they carried out the latest attack. The group published a number of files online on Pastebin containing lists of tens of thousands of email addresses and passwords. These lists were publicly accessible to anybody using the site.

In a statement the group said with more resources they could have take “every last bit” of information from Sony.

“We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.”

“Due to a lack of resources on our part we were unable to fully copy all of this information. In theory we could have taken every last bit of information, but it would have taken several more weeks,” the group said.

Lulz said they carried out the attack to expose SonyPictures.com’s most “primitive and common vulnerabilities”.

“Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks? What’s worse is that every bit of data we took wasn’t encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it’s just a matter of taking it. This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it,” the group said.

SonyPictures.com executive vice president Jim Kennedy said the company was looking into the claims

This is not the first time in recent months that Sony has been subjected to such hacks. The hackers group Anonymous began attacking the Japanese electronics giant’s online service in April which took some of the company’s services offline for close to a month

Sony PlayStation Network, Sony Online entertainment and its music streaming service Qriocity were some of the services targeted by the hackers, in what was one of the largest data breaches ever.

Hackers managed to access personal information on a staggering 77 million PlayStation Network and Qriocity accounts, the vast majority of which were in North America and Europe.

US aerospace giant Boeing has also confirmed it is under “continuous” cyber attack, although there has been no breach of any of its databases.

Chief executive of Boeing Defence, Space and Security Dennis Muilenberg said it was constantly vigilant to the increasing threat.

“We recognise the reality of global business today is that cyber attacks are part of business and we’ve been prepared for that, so this is not a surprising environment to us. I can tell you that the defensive capabilities that we’ve built up are very effective, and give us confidence and our enterprise is secure because of that investment,” he said.

The threat of cyber attacks is also increasingly on the agenda of governments, with Australia confirming it is to develop a cyber defence strategy. The US has also confirmed it is to treat hostile acts in cyberspace just like any other threat to the country.