SQLServerCentral Editorial

Everyone is a Target

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There was a piece in Dark Reading about a security researcher being targeted by a hacking group. While this is more political, this does raise some questions about how hackers might target our systems in the future. It just might be through personalized attacks against anyone that has privileged access.

In this case, hackers learned who researchers were and made repeated attempts to personally craft phishing attacks against specific people. However since many hackers communicate with each other, and could easily turn from political goals to economic ones, I'd be concerned about how this might affect data professionals in the future.

We know that social engineering works. While many of our customers and clients do have access to large amount of data and are perhaps easier targets, I would still expect to see attacks against a data professional that manages lots of data. Especially if the individual might have access to high profile data, or multiple companies as a consultant.

Targeted attacks against individuals could be a concern for many of us. We are usually more conscious of phishing and social engineering, but we're not invulnerable. Many of us need to practice good security habits, being careful how we access privileged information, and perhaps even finding ways to do so only through containers or virtual machines that may protect us against some of the malware that could slip past us.

Security is a pain, it's annoying, it can slow us down, and it is hard to adhere to best practices consistently and constantly. However we need to be careful and vigilant against the regular stream of attacks that will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

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