Do you cheat on your spouse? Then chances are, you’re sweating bullets over the recent Ashley Madison hack. However, if you’re in enterprise IT, you should be as distressed as any cheater, regardless of how faithful to your other half you actually happen to be.
Here are the facts: earlier this week, an anonymous group of hackers going by the name The Impact Team hacked the adultery website Ashley Madison. The hackers stole large caches of data, including information about users who paid Ashley Madison to delete their data.
Before you turn up your nose with schadenfreude or rush out to buy flowers for your mate in a desperate (but likely doomed) damage control gesture, consider the important lessons for all enterprise cybersecurity – regardless of business model.
The first lesson, of course, is one you should have already learned: not only are all organizations vulnerable to attack, but they have already been attacked. You shouldn’t be asking when an attack might occur. You should be asking how long have the hackers been inside your network and how best to mitigate further damage.
The Ashley Madison attack, however, teaches a second, equally important lesson – one that cybersecurity professionals are less likely to have learned.
Hackers are usually thieves, looking for financial gain. Sometimes they are vandals, intent on destruction. But what if they be extortionists, looking to shut down your organization entirely?
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/07/23/ashley-madison-extortion-attack-critical-lessons-for-enterprise-cybersecurity/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Lisa Brewster.
