the exclamake! blog

This article in the Vancouver Sun describes how 78 computers inside British Columbia’s government network were compromised.  The important thing to note here is that they were not attacked for the data that they held.  In fact, it appears that no information was stolen from these servers.

They were used to store downloaded movies and “‘hacker’ programs” (Canadian for warez).  This should be a wakeup call for any business that has a high-speed connection to the internet.  Many businesses feel, “we don’t have anything that a hacker would want so we don’t need to pay close attention to security.”  The fact is, you could be considered a valuable target if you simply have filespace and bandwidth.

Sidenote:  Makes you wonder about the security of other government sites, eh?  There are numerous reports of spyware infecting computers inside US military and government sites, but that’s another entry.