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
