Cyberwar Spills Onto Business

It's good that people are paying some attention to cyberwar - the extension of conflicts onto the Internet. The New York Times even is running a story about it. But cyberwar is old business. One of the biggest motivations for hackers these days is politics of various sorts, and even the "least developed" (whatever that means) countries have access to basic computer technology that takes relatively little infrastructure to put into practice.

I remember researching one story where I was speaking with representatives of a security analyst firm as well as other experts and an Italian hacker. Politics is a major factor in hacking these days, with thousands of businesses fending off attacks and trying to recover from web site defacements of political slogans. There are active political hacking groups in various parts of the Middle East and in China, for example. And companies that are associated with particular countries can find themselves targets of sophaisticated people who have little else to do. Digital security has to become a strategic issue, which is still an unusual approach among corporations.