If you’ve seen the movie “Hackers” (remember “Crash Override” and “Acid Burn” – that movie where Angelina Jolie met her first husband), you know that hacking is not something to take lightly. And in this day and age where most of our information (personal and professional) is stored online, hackers are having a field day scheming up ways to use all of this information against us. And who more to protect than our own government, as is with all matters of “national security.”
Costin Raiu, Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team Director, says the government must put in place their own defense strategies against attacks on government websites. They must also conduct security audits of their servers as soon as possible to identify potential vulnerabilities. “First of all, it’s important to have an anti-DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) plan – be it from increasing the internet bandwidth to purchasing a specific anti-DDoS service plan,” Raiu says. “Given the past incidents of this kind, it is expected that the attack will consist of a DDoS flood designed to bring down the server and make it unreachable. It’s possible the confidential information will be sought after, so the defense strategies would be multiple,” Raiu warns.
According to the Kaspersky expert, even with the best ways to protect websites, there could still be attacks that might get through. As such, Raiu says governments must have contingency plans in place to ensure continued operations of the websites.