HACK or be hacked, that?s the message that Wordware Distributors (M) Sdn Bhd is sending out. Well, sort of ?.
Wordware, the distributor of e-business programmes offered by the New York-based International Council of E-commerce Consultants or EC-Council (
www.eccouncil.org), says that the only way for companies to protect themselves from hackers is to think like one.
Wordware claims that 3,000 cyber crimes and Internet security breaches were reported locally in the past five years. Wordware?s managing director, Wilson Wong, said that companies need to understand what is hacking, how it works and the countermeasures available. Wong said this at the Ethical Hacking and Countermeasures seminar in Kuala Lumpur last week.
According to Wong, the seminar revealed many secret tools hackers use and ways for companies to prevent attacks. ?We also provide lab training to explain techniques used to hack a system and then protect the same system.?
Wordware?s vice-president of sales and marketing Sanjay Bavisi said, ?It?s scary that Malaysia doesn?t have many ethical hackers. I can think of maybe five, while America is infested with them. Companies need to revolutionise their thinking and hire someone to be the devil?s advocate. Many companies are not aware of how easy it is to hack. For instance, a Hotmail account can be cracked in 60 seconds.?
?A lot of security professionals have no knowledge of hacking technologies such as Obi-wan, a password hacking delivery tool. There are tools that crash computers, impersonate users, deface websites and automate attacks.?
Sanjay said that companies were reluctant to hire ethical hackers because it would be an additional cost, but they fail to see the incurred cost if their system were hacked into.
Sanjay also outlined the differences between a network security person and an ethical hacker. ?An ethical hacker will just hack while the security person takes care of the network and the firewalls,? he said.
Sanjay claimed that an ethical hacker in the United States could earn up to US$120,000 (RM456,000) a year.
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