British businesses are being warned about Chinese industrial espionage aimed at retrieving financially sensitive data. In particular, at least 1000 businesses have been warned that they’ve potentially been targeted to obtain data on their trading with Chinese companies, in an attempt for the Chinese parties to negotiate higher prices in their business dealings. There’s an article here with the full story.
This post is aimed at businesses, whether large or small. Online espionage, or cyber spying, is a real threat. It doesn’t necessarily need to come from China either, the technology and skills exist in just about every city and country that’s connected to the internet.
Everyone needs to secure both their networks and the computers with it. The old belief that a firewall is enough has always been false, even more so now that data threats can come from so many levels (see the SANS document that was mentioned here earlier). It’s everyone’s responsibility to do everything within their power to increase security. The threats are out there, large amounts of (your) money are stake, and there’s always something you can do.
So now is a good time to review your network security and to improve it.