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Government data of any nation across the globe is a gold mine for hackers. This data normally consists of sensitive information and strategic blueprints including private public data containing name, age, date of birth, address, personal identification number or even passport number, registered mobile numbers and so forth. This data is highly lucrative for cyber crooks because it sells in the dark web!. Not only that rogue-nations bank on organized cyber criminals to steal confidential information (cyber-espionage) or execute cyber attacks on vital installations.
A spate of attacks on Government Organizations
Although the Government organizations are continuously trying to concentrate on data security and reinforcing security controls, still we find data breach incidents every now and then. Recently, 5 million Bulgarians’ records were hacked from the country’s tax revenue office. While the entire country has an overall population of 7 million, this amount of hack is highly alarming and shows how an entire nation can be under some hacker’s radar due to minutest of negligence. Earlier this year, Oklahoma department of securities, USA, revealed that almost 2 million data was compromised beyond recovery. This raised serious questions about the security integrity of the network of Oklahoma department of securities. Even the Russian citizens and officials became victims of data breach due to compromise of passport information a couple of months’ back.
Are Governments up to the cyber-warfare?
Government agencies are a treasure-trove of nation’s confidential information for cyber-criminals. Hence, ideally, government organizations should be responsible enough to ensure the security of both private and sensitive information. In this process of nation-building, cyber crooks however often stand tall as barriers and halt a nation’s digital transformation with their anomalous activities. Today they are getting technologically more advanced, well funded often by state sponsors, who not only target the network, but also the database and applications to breach data.
Government organizations are again vulnerable to malicious insiders. On many occasions, organizations fall prey to the rage of employee revenge, greed, unfaithfulness and other factors which lead to disastrous consequences. In reference to one of our previous articles discussing WannaCry attack, it won’t be wrong to emphasize on the fact that government organizations need to be more vigilant to safeguard the inner peripheries and overhaul access control mechanisms which are targeted by malicious insiders and organized cyber criminals. While reinforcing security solutions like IDS or IPS, Government organizations pay scant attention to the privileged identities which are often exploited and snooped by malefactors. Keeping in mind the modern cyber warfare, it is essential for government organizations to redraw security and control mechanisms to secure confidential data.
It’s a high time for government security departments to start giving more attention to the security of inner peripheries and protect confidential records from breaches/ thefts along with strengthening the network boundary.
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
