Some security thoughts......

8:54

I suppose you all know, except for those of you that were doing their winter beauty sleep, that we had a several security incidents in last weeks in Belgium.

Picanol was down for over a week, Willebroek (huge city in Flanders 😊) had to get their typewriters back on the desks again,…. Each day, each week you will see similar things. Is this just in Belgium? Of course not, sometimes it’s a small target (like Willebroek) sometimes the target is bigger, sometimes it’s ‘on purpose’ that companies/products get hacked. We call that ethical hacking….this is done to find flaws. In August 2019 last year a small device called the “F-15 Fighter Jet” was hacked.

Donald (not Duck) would say that this is of course “fake news”, but it isn’t.

Security isn’t simple. Just think about your own house. You can have the best front door in the world, nobody can get it without the correct super secret and secured key. But you have a crappy backdoor, so how secure is your house knowing that? You could have the best front and backdoor and super secure windows, and an alarm system and on top of that within the house you have 10 dogs protecting everything. In front of the house 5 security guards. And a fence and ….. Costing you a lot. And are you sure nobody will be able to get in the house? How long does it take you to get into your house? Security is find the correct balance between cost and risk.

Can we guarantee 100% security? Sure…..

Can we help our customer? Sure…..

Just to get back to a physical (none IT) example. There is a TV show called “Kamp Waes”. Basically you have some normal people who get training by our special forces. Those special forces are so full of their super secured camp that they didn’t see that there was a simple way to get into their camp. One tree was so close to the fence that it was easy to climb that tree and jump over the fence. They didn’t see that because they were to close to their own stuff. Someone not close to them saw it on day 1 he was in the camp. So (to use some buzz sentences) by “thinking out of the box” and by using “an helicopter view” we can see things that our customers don’t see or don’t see “anymore”.

But will our customers get hacked as they do not have sensitive info? 

If you were reading this artcicle carefully, you saw that the first line of the article had a time stamp. It’s now 9:06. Between both times (so that isn’t very long) my own servers (those of my company) got also hit by hackers. Below are the hacking attempts that I stopped…

The question is not will you be hacked, the question is when will you be hacked (and when will you know it)