Hacking and its effect on businesses- Odunze Reginald C

Hacking and its effect on Businesses

Hacking is a dangerous phenomenon and has caused several problems to individuals, organizations, firms and even country. In Business day report captioned ‘Nigeria now attractive to cyber criminal-Ernest and Young. According to Uzor 2011:22 “the increasing spate of cyber attacks globally might be causing Nigeria Firms, a loss of $200 Million yearly, according to Ernest and Young investigations, Tal Moses and Amir Rasilevski in a one day workshop in Lagos on Hacking and Anti Hacking system stated “that due to lack of awareness and partly negligence on the part of some indigenous and multinational companies. In the country, infiltrators were allowed access to data base of these organizations, by so doing causing several damages including hacking, virus infiltrations among others “

Hacking which  may be defined as the unauthorized access to data base of organization with the sole aim of stealing data, passwords and the likes with the intent to commit fraud and cause the failure of the organization.

To Moses” the  most common and impact attacks  against companies often application vulnerabilities adding that these attacks  often leverage well known issues to steal data and compromise users and  to solve these issues and to protect against these threats ,” companies need to identify the issues within their applications,  fix the coding flaws that create the vulnerabilities, train their  developers to avoid future issues and build security in to their software development life circle process”

The effrontery with which these hackers penetrate data base of organizations leaves much in the mind of people, organizations and even countries.

In a report captioned “Pimp my password” by the Time Magazine, (Stein 2011:62) opined that “there have been a rash of cyber attacks in which passwords have been stolen”, he stated that in June 2011, the hacking group Lulzsec, whose Motto is  ”Laughing at your security since 2011, publish the names, email addresses, passwords, birthdays and mailing addresses of Sony customers” In December 2011, a group called Gnosis posted more than 200,000 e mail addresses  and passwords of registered Gawker websites” . Continuing Stein (op cited) stated that “ In apparently every year Rupert Murdoch’s employees broke into everyone’s cell phones”

But Diana Smelters, a software Engineer who got a PhD at MIT Boston in Computational Neuroscience according to Joel has this to say “to safeguard password- which involves writing the she doesn’t use regularly and locking them in a fireproof safe in her house”

In a similar presentation, Oloruntoba, Anti piracy Manager, Microsoft stated that piracy brings in many dangers in the form of Malware, spyware and viruses that can lead to identity theft, loss of data, and more” Oloruntoba 2011 in Uzor ( 2011:62)

There it becomes imperative to choose a good and strong passwords, even it means writing it and keeping it somewhere, avoiding birthday, children’s birth day and spouse birthday. It is not all websites that you register your name and phone numbers

The need to have an ethical hacker in an organization to safeguard the data base of the organization has becomes a paramount concern, according to a recent research conducted in the United States America, the most paying job among the computer scientist is the job of an Ethical Hacker.

Odunze Reginald C