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Oracle and other companies 'punkd' in the hacking contest
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 10 August 2011, 00:38 IST
Bangalore: According to Reuters, a contest held at the world's largest hacking convention in Las Vegas exposed a single reason why large business organizations seem to be an easy target of attack for cyber criminals. The single reason that came into limelight was that the workers of the large business organizations are unsatisfactorily trained in security.
As one may believe that most of the companies, today are specially concentrating on security factors, because the companies are surrounded by a spate of high-profile cyber assaults on targets ranging from Sony to the International Monetary Fund.
But the hackers participating in the contest found it uncomplicated in some cases to trick employees at some of the largest U.S. companies to reveal information that can be used in planning cyber attacks against them.
The contestants also managed to gather employees to use their corporate PC's to browse the websites suggested by the hackers. Had these been criminal hackers, the websites could have loaded malicious software onto the PCs.
One of the contestant faked to work for a company's IT department and adviced an employee to provide him information on the configuration of her PC, data that could help a hacker decide what type of malware would work best in an attack.
Defcon is organized by benevolent hackers, partly to promote research on security vulnerabilities in order to pressurize the companies to fix them. The contest was sponsored by so-called white-hat hackers to provide adequate information to the companies that their security data is weak, and to encourage them to inform their employees about the risks of hacking.
The employees of Oracle handed over the maximum number of data, according to Hadnagy. One of the world's largest software makers, Oracle got its start more than 30 years ago by selling secure databases to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Other targets included Apple Inc, AT&T Inc, ConAgra Foods Inc, Delta Air Lines Inc, Symantec Corp, Sysco Corp, United Continental Holdings Inc's United Airlines and Verizon Communications Inc.
It was the second year that Defcon held a contest in "social engineering,"
