Jowat Magazine 2013-01 EN

P|5Progress 1 |2013 you can access digital property, or get protected infor- mation which forms the fundamentals of corporate as- sets, and you can do this online. Just like that. Because it can be done. Because the information technology as production site, sales channel, and online safe, is not secure. At least not secure enough, as we see confir- med every day by news on successful hacker attacks and data leaks. Of course, the value chain had already been prone to attacks before the advent of the internet age, risks were comparable for honest companies. Ships were hijacked in international waters, where the state police protection failed. Pirating is motivated by greed and gall: Why work seriously and over a long time, why as- sume responsibilities and take entrepreneurial risks, if you can just take what is not yours. This applies also to the internet, a similar ocean with a fascinating open horizon, with the seemingly unlimited power of the di- gital wave, that will allow you to float along, but also to dive into it. The others keep an eye on values that develop there – and seize these. Just like that. Becau- se it can be done. The damage which is caused each year by network pirating is globally assessed to be way over 100 billion Dollars. And this is not limited to illegal file sharing, platforms for exchanging music, films and software which profit from the failure of an efficient di- gital rights management while feeding more or less on a laissez-faire mentality to do away with the last ob- stacles of personal integrity: Is this allowed? Why not? Everyone is doing it. Network pirating, however, is more. It also covers on- line spying, accessing business secrets on corporate servers. And the process that the new pirates use here can be almost called subtle: These data are not simply hacked. They are plundered without a trace, by emplo- ying imagination and carefully planned procedures. The magic formula has a name: Social Media Engineering. Social networks like Facebook, XING, LinkedIn & the like offer innumerable chances to establish contacts, to gain confidence, to collect harmless data, in order to link these with other seemingly harmless data. In the end, these are used to filter out the key that opens the door to the really valuable data. Online spies profit in this case by the so-called plug-and-play trap: Even se- rious businessmen fall prey to the charm of cult items like iPhone and iPad. Here, numerous, often useful, above all very practical apps invite the user to enter and publish data that vanish from view out of their con- text, as soon as the latest, highly useful, entertaining, and above all so very uncomplicated app pops up. And this shows the problem: There is hardly any protection against the methods of the network pirates. They are part of the in-crowd of smart lifers, are fluent in anything IT, while the companies, and above all the people wor- king for them, are more or less subjects governed by IT. Of course: There are laws, on national and international levels. Many things are illegal: gaining access to private networks by data spying and raiding digital (and ana- logue) property. But the Law is increasingly losing its control function, because it is faced with systems that are self-organizing and practically self-controlling, and Protection against data spying by modern IT security Jowat Focus

Jowat Magazine 2013-01 EN

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