We have seen numerous hacks in the past years, but the Sony hack of December 2014 has topped them all. The hackers brought a multinational corporation down on their knees when Sony decided to cancel the release of their movie The Interview. Fortunately, Sony decided later to release the movie anyway. Apart from the massive amounts of leaked internal documents that show how the relationships in Hollywood are, also all kinds of financial documents are now part of the public domain. Of course, some of the leaked information was quite interesting, but most of it an outrageous invasion of privacy, possibly damaging individual reputations. Apart from all that, the hack will probably cost Sony hundreds of millions of dollars in damage reputation and lost revenues.
The tremendous hack of Sony, and the result that the hackers achieved, can set an example for other digital criminals to attack organizations. With the enormous amount of data that organizations create, the vast array of IT systems that they use and the numerous amounts of employees that have access to all kinds of data, we will probably see a lot more hacks in the future.
According to the FBI, hackers are replacing terrorists as the most severe threat for the USA and experts are warning that a major digital attack on for transportation or the energy grid is just a matter of time.
Thats why I foresee a bright future for Big Data Security Analytics, as I described in my Big Data trends forecast for 2015. As described by Alvaro Cardenas, the objective of Big Data Security Analytics is to obtain actionable intelligence in real time”. These actionable insights can then be used to prevent or stop a digital attack at your organization. Perhaps the Sony hack will cause a spur in the development of Big Data Security Analytics, as organizations are going to do what it takes to prevent this from happening to them as well.
The below infographic, developed by Whoishostingthis, shows some of the major attacks that have been done in the past 2 years (the infographic is from before the Sony attack) and what governments around the world are doing to prevent such attacks. The United States for example, is working hard to develop Intrusion Prevention Systems to reduce the amount of malicious traffic that comes in as well as build a cyber workforce that is capable of combatting with these hackers. Also the European Union is working hard on improving the regions cyber defences. There is still a long way to go, but with better regulations, harsher legal consequences and of course better Big Data Security Analytics, a more secure world is waiting for us.
