Is This the Golden Age of Hacking?

Barence writes "With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers."

Comments

Perhaps not more common, just more visible

[gman003]

Haven't RTFA'd yet, but I would suspect that hacks aren't any more common now - just more visible and more reported. It's like when the news media has a "summer of the shark" - after a few notable incidents, the media realizes that these stories bring in viewers, and then any further incidents, no matter how insignificant, are publicized when they otherwise wouldn't be. Just look at the recent Bethesda hack - that kind of thing goes on all the time, and I was surprised anyone bothered paying attention to it. Sure, some of them were big - the first Sony attack was significant, and the US Senate hack is noteworthy - but a lot of these recent hacks have been relatively minor.

There's also the possibility that all this attention is actually causing more hacks - after the initial Sony hack, hackers realized that Sony was a big, vulnerable target. By extension, they realized that big companies actually aren't bulletproof - in fact, many of them have terrible security. I'm sure such knowledge was widespread in the black-hat world, but now the secret is public knowledge.