A Little Homework Goes A Long Way

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A Little Homework Goes A Long Way

Despite GE's experience, most hacker incidents on the Internet can be prevented with readily available advice, tools, and techniques, according to the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"There are four top exploitation techniques" among hackers, says Dain Gary, operations manager at CERT, "and we give advice on how to counter them, but the advice is not heeded." He estimates that 85% of the 150-250 hacker incidents that CERT becomes involved with each month use the familiar techniques.

Hacker incidents have increased 76% this year over last, Gary adds, but notes that everything on the Internet is growing at explosive rates. The number of reg istered host computers, for example, has exploded 4,700% since CERT was founded six years ago. Most of that growth has been in the commercial domain, where there are now more than 1 million host computers, which exceeds the number of host computers in the academic and research domains where Internet was born.

And too many of the new commercial users lack the technical skills and support to operate securely in the complex environment of the Internet, Gary believes. Worse, he adds, "They don't appreciate the magnitude of the risk." On the Internet, he explains, "The bad guys know more than the good guys."