spear phishing
サイバー攻撃の脅威へ対応する企業について書かれた記事です。サイバー犯罪は近年，世界が懸念している大きな問題であります。IT業界や金融業界などはサイバー攻撃に対応する方法を模索しております。このような状況の中で，Bromiumというベンチャー企業はIT上のセキュリティを向上する画期的なシステムを開発したとして話題になっているようです。
記事の中で気になった表現は"spear phishing"です。Oxford Dictionaries.comには"The fraudulent practice of sending emails ostensibly from a known or trusted sender in order to induce targeted individuals to reveal confidential information"と定義されております。特定個人から情報を盗む手法を指すようです。(Ume)
Can a 'superpower force field' protect us from hackers?
Prof Giovanni Vigna is a director of the University of California in Santa Barbara's cybersecurity centre and co-founder of malware detection company, Lastline.
He says: "Virtualisation is a very effective way of containing the effects of an attack because it isolates the bad stuff, and that's awesome," he says.
But it is not a "silver bullet", he warns.
"It won't prevent users from giving away sensitive security data in targeted spear phishing attacks," he says.
This is where staff are hoodwinked into giving away security details because hackers have collated enough personal details to make an email or document look entirely official and convincing.
This type of manipulation - called social engineering - is still "very effective", says Prof Vigna. "It's difficult to protect against human stupidity."
Bromium's Ian Pratt accepts that this is a limitation of virtualisation, but he maintains: "In 80% of cases hackers are gaining access to enterprise networks through staff clicking on dodgy links.
"Our system limits the damage that can be caused. We're trying to make these attacks far more expensive to execute."
