A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 396

ators Lieberman and Collins. As is becoming the congressional norm, the Repub-
licans and Democrats could not agree even on a topic as urgent as cybersecurity.
Data Theft from Corporations
Verizon did a study of corporate data theft in 2011 and found about 855 incidents
with thefts of perhaps 174 million corporate records. An interesting part of the
study was that about 57% of the stolen data was taken by hacktivists who stole the
data for political purposes rather than for resale to cybercriminals. Political groups
such as Anonymous and Lulzsec also attack and deface corporate and government
websites. The following are examples of corporate data theft:
• In 2009, three people were arrested for stealing about 130 million credit
and debit card numbers for companies such as 7-Eleven and Hannaford
Brothers. A card payment company, Heartland Payment Systems, was the
target of the attack, which used a sophisticated SQL injection attack.
• In 2011, Norway's energy, gas, and defense companies were hit by ten ap-
parently coordinated cyberattacks that swept disk drives for personal in-
formation and industrial secrets. An infected email was the host.
• Early in 2012, about 10 million customer accounts for Visa and Master-
Card were compromised and probably stolen. Apparently, a third-party
contractor, Global Payments, was the actual company targeted for the
theft.
• In May 2012, the professional network LinkedIn reported data thefts of
millions of passwords. Indeed, about 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords ac-
tually were displayed on a Russian website.
These samples demonstrate that corporate data theft will probably impact close
to 25% of U.S. citizens within the next five years.
Data Theft from Unsecured Networks
I live in a fairly small town with a population of about 17,000. Within a mile of the
office where I write are at least a dozen free wireless networks at local coffeeshops
and restaurants.
In my neighborhood, all of the neighbors have private networks, which is com-
mon in today's world. Most home networks are secured, but some home networks
are not. Recently, a friend with an unsecured network noticed a slow-down on his
network and discovered that a teenage neighbor had signed onto the network and
was downloading films and music.