For those who thought 2020 had enough problems already, the last week brought new records on technology topics. The antitrust lawsuit was filed against Facebook in the United States. And, with immediate effect, it had a massive attack on the cybersecurity company FireEye.
You may not know FireEye, but it certainly knows all about the most hidden aspects of the Internet. His specialty is the fight against small and large virtual attacks. His clients include large corporations and governments around the world.
If you want to know more, you can watch the episode “Cybersecurity” from the series “Expresso Futuro”, in which I interviewed the company’s director for Latin America.
The details of the attack have not yet been disclosed. However, it has already been confirmed that several techniques that FireEye uses to conduct penetration tests on businesses and governments have been leaked.
Companies like FireEye also act as “hackers” and use their technological knowledge forever. In other words, they catalog all the techniques of invasion into previously known systems.
Customers then hire FireEye to use their weapons in a controlled manner against them and look for loopholes for the invasion. If a breach is found, FireEye will help the company shut it down, reducing risk.
These hacking techniques are of course kept under seven keys, which was insufficient to prevent malicious agents from capturing them.
In the vast majority of cases, when a company hires a service like FireEye, they find the ungrateful surprise that their systems have multiple loopholes and vulnerabilities that can be exploited. There are hardly any systems that score 10 on invasion tests of this type.
Well, the entire arsenal of security breaches is now in the hands of malicious agents. This news is catastrophic for Brazil. Unfortunately, our country’s culture when it comes to cybersecurity, especially in the state sector, is poor.
Brazil ranks 70th in the global cybersecurity ranking and 6th in Latin America behind Paraguay. It is not a case that there has been a series of attacks in the past few weeks that paralyzed Brazilian public institutions at the Supreme Court.
Government agencies or companies prepared for an attack with the FireEye arsenal are very rare. What to do? First, the country needs to wake up to cybersecurity. A clear policy for the public sector is needed. It is best for the private sector to invest to prevent this from happening. It’s much cheaper than cure.
One step is urgent: you need to update and apply the latest patches to all systems that organizations use. This has to be done now. Which patches? There is a list of at least 16 most popular products on the Internet for Adobe, Microsoft, Citrix, and others.
Anyone who no longer takes cybersecurity seriously will be more naked than the legendary king.
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To think cybersecurity is a problem for others
Massive cyber security attacks on government systems and FireEye leak
Come on, cybersecurity is a problem for others
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