Thursday 28 January 2010

This is becoming a full time job

One of the problems with being an ethical hacker is that no one ever believes that they need you until it's to late.
That's why here at Phortress we sell avoidence but always seem to end up charging for repairs and fixing things out of hours and after the event. (Hence our repair charges being more than our avoidance charge)

Because no one ever believes that they will be hacked both of us usually end our business meetings being told that we will be called when we are needed, but of course by then the damage is done.

It is the "being called when needed" ethos that eventually had us become ambulance chasers, finding websites or organisations who had been hacked and then offering  to find out how. It is our principle source of income.

The best place in the world to track web site hacks is www.zone-h.org, zone-h takes information from any source, verifies the hack and posts it online.

When we started ambulance chasing in 2008 zone-h updated about five pages a day with approx 25 hacks per page. Just two years later zone-h are updating around 30+ pages a day at 25 hacked websites per page. The list is now so long that it takes me most of my working day just to email the organisations that have been hit.

This in itself shows the dramatic rise in cyber vandalism.

It really is time for organisations to open their eyes to this problem