Four IT Security Lessons to Learn From Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack
On Christmas Eve, while most of us were immersed in the holiday spirit, others were immersed in the sensitive information of Stratfor Global Intelligence Service’s client list. A group of hackers, associated with the collective known as Anonymous, breached Stratfor’s systems, obtaining the credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses of the company’s customers. The group has already used this stolen information to make donations to charities, such as the American Red Cross. (This story keeps evolving as new information is released. For the latest updates, check out The New York Times topic page on Anonymous here.) Breaches like this are happening so frequently (just follow the medical community for the evidence) that they’re becoming ho-hum. But that’s even more reason to question how they can happen in the first place. This is 2011, after all, and technology in organizations should, in almost every case, protect against something like this. To help you ensure you don’t become the next Stratfor, here are four lessons in IT security that you can take to your organization.
