By Ian Harvey I
t was all supposed to go quiet out there on the data frontier. Nefarious group LulzSec (Lulz Security), which hacked data from the Sony PlayStation Network web site and attacked U.S. police and federal agencies, said in June it was opting for retirement. Unfortunately, it was soon back in action, working with another throwback group of hackers, Anonymous, to attack high-profile targets and steal even more data.
Retired or not, LulzSec and its imita- tors like LulzRaft, a Canadian group which hacked into the Conservative Party of Canada and spoofed Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s hospitalization in early June, are still a threat, despite 21 arrests by the FBI in July.
All of this proves that the threats we all hear about are real. Data is the new cur- rency everyone wants and the hackers will do whatever they can to steal it and cash in if they can. However, their aim is not al- ways financial; often the motive is stealing identities for profit or disrupting high pro- file agencies and companies to expose their vulnerabilities.
While the attacks are illegal and per- sistent, there’s some learning to be had from breaches at Sony Corp, Honda Canada, Lockheed Martin, Epsilion, RSA, the Government of Canada and several U.S. agencies.
And the first take-away is that everyone is vulnerable. Having a secure network is everyone’s goal but there’s always the human factor, usually the weakest link. It’s a complex issue — and potentially expensive — because the response to a breach may have to comply with more
than one jurisdiction’s rules, safeguard the company’s security by not revealing too much about how the breach occurred while remaining as transparent as pos- sible to protect brand image and impor- tant relationships with customers. The hack, which brought LulzSec to national attention, was the one it perpe- trated against Sony Online Entertain- ment. Sometime on April 16 and 17 hackers siphoned data from 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment accounts. It included an “outdated (2007) database with 12,700 non-U.S. credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes), and about 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Nether- lands and Spain.”
Still, Sony waited until May 3 to go public, having shut down its network two days earlier without explanation. Similarly in May, Honda Canada publicly said it suf- fered a data breach and that nearly 300,000 customers’ names, addresses, Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN), and, in some cases, Honda Financial Services (HFS) account numbers were stolen. Coincidentally, six months earlier, Honda America was also hit.
“The information was limited and is not typically used for the purposes of identity theft or fraud,” Honda Canada said in a statement, adding the data related to a 2009 marketing campaign.
Both companies now face class action lawsuits claiming millions in damages but according to a study by U.S.-based Lares Institute, a think tank looking at emerging technology and information governance
issues, including cyber-terrorism and na- tional security, the legal risk may be small because plaintiffs must show actual losses or damages to convince the courts to hand down financial compensation. That doesn’t mean a casual attitude will suffice, nor will simply reporting the breach be enough, says Halifax, N.S., lawyer David Fraser of McInnes Cooper and president of the Canadian IT Law Association. “What’s interesting is that the legal lia- bility is not as big as some people think it is here in Canada,” says Fraser. “Some ju- risdictions don’t even require reporting to the privacy commission unless it’s health information, for example.”
Following a data breach, doing the minimum isn’t always enough, Fraser suggests, because protecting the com- pany’s brand reputation and relationship with all customers is critically important. Ultimately, how contact is made with cus- tomers will mitigate the response — and perhaps any litigated damages. “You also don’t want to contact those people with a letter that looks like it was written by a pack of lawyers and says nothing,” he says, noting that compli- ance in one jurisdiction may cause prob- lems in other jurisdictions if everyone isn’t treated equally.
Sony in the United States, for example, offered free credit record monitoring to impacted customers, but didn’t extend the offer to Canadians, the kind of thing that often feeds a media frenzy. Getting “out in front of the story” is something all companies should have enshrined in their plan, says Sam Bornstein,
June 4:
LulzSec is blamed for the hacking of In- fragaard, an agency that works with the FBI, publishing 180 names, passwords and e-mail addresses.
June 7: Copycat hackers, LulzRaft, hack the Conservative Party of Canada web site, posting a made-up story about Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
June 8:
LulzRaft hits the Conservative site again taking details about donors; very same day, it hacks Husky Energy’s web site, posting an offer for “free gas.”
June 8:
LulzSec breaks into Black & Berg Cy- bersecurity Consulting, a small net- work security company, inserting their image after the owner posted a chal- lenge that his site was secure and of- fering $10,000 and a job to anyone who successfully hacked it.
June 9:
The British National Health Service is at- tacked by LulzSec, saying it meant no harm: “We only want to help you fix your tech issues.”
June 10: LulzSec releases the passwords of 26,000 users from 55 porn websites — just for fun.
June 14:
LulzSec cyber attacks the U.S. Senate web site.
June 15: LulzSec strikes sev- eral gaming web sites.
June 20:
Anonymous and an- other splinter group, AntiSec, unleashes at- tacks on a British Police agency and a Chinese government web site.
June 21: LulzSec tweets it has obtained the U.K. census data as a result of its hack into Lock- heed Martin.
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