Despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that organizations have invested in information security technology to secure their critical business-technology infrastructures, the bad news keeps breaking. In the past year, dozens of companies have had to inform their customers that the exposure of their personally-identifiable financial information had placed them at great risk of identity theft. The incidents range from fraudsters successfully establishing bogus access accounts to steal legitimate consumer information to hacked networks to lost backup tapes containing the financial information of millions of consumers.
Its not just the widely-publicized cases that count. In the past several years the federal government has prosecuted individuals for criminally abusing their insider access. In February of 2005, federal prosecutors indicted an IT manager for gaining unauthorized access to his former employers network to read e-mail and causing damage to its systems. Federal prosecutors have also prosecuted and found employees guilty of password trafficking, selling customer financial information -- including detailed credit reports -- to organized crime.
About the author
George V. Hulme is an internationally recognized information security journalist. For more than 20 years Hulme has written about business, technology, and IT security topics. From March 2000 through March 2005, as senior editor at InformationWeek magazine, he covered the IT security and homeland security beats. His work has appeared in CNN.com, Government Computer News, Nations Business, Network World, San Francisco Examiner, The Industry Standard, VARBusiness, and dozens of other technology publications.
This white paper was commissioned by Cyber-Ark Software, Inc. All content and assertions are the independent work and opinions of George V. Hulme.
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