Hackers shift focus to corporate intellectual property
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 29 March 2011, 11:12 IST
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Bangalore: Intellectual property and trade secrets are increasingly becoming the principal target for hackers, reveals a new report from McAfee. Shifting from social security numbers and such other personal information, trade secrets and marketing plans are their prime focus and these provide the new currency to the cyber world economy. A cyber security products and services provider McAfee authored the study with SAIC, a scientific and engineering company that works with national security agencies. McAfee?s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Simon Hunt opined that online criminals understand there is "greater value" in selling a corporations' proprietary information and trade secrets. ?They have shifted their focus from physical assets to data driven properties, such as trade secrets or product planning documents,? he said. Many organizations are contemplating on storing intellectual property abroad. Companies in U.K. China, U.S. and Japan are spending more than $1 million per day on IT related costs. It should also be noted that organizations in the U.S., China, and India spent over $1 million per week to secure sensitive information abroad. ?We've seen significant attacks targeting this type of information. Sophisticated attacks such as s Operation Aurora, and even unsophisticated attacks like Night Dragon, have infiltrated some of the largest and seemingly most protected corporations in the world. Criminals are targeting corporate intellectual capital and they are often succeeding." New technology trends such as the cloud computing and migration process from the internal network to mobile gadgets make it very difficult to protect corporate intellectual property.

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