Trust No One – Protecting Data Centers Against Cyber Espionage

 

By Paul Darby

Security concerns are rippling across the IT industry. The WannaCry ransomware attack which hit the NHS and data theft incidents like that experienced by Wonga, the payday loan company, leave a sense of unease that traditional security measures are failing to allay.

Data centers have particular challenges to face when it comes to security, because they not only need to construct cyber-defenses, but physical barriers too, to protect and safeguard equipment and sensitive data.

Now there is a new threat lurking that is set to put data center security in the spotlight, and that is the exponential rise in politically motivated, or state-sponsored cyber-attacks. 

Spy games

The rumors about leaked communications from hacked servers that circulated following the US Presidential election continue to surface in news stories, and more recently the new French President, Emmanuel Macron was targeted by a coordinated hacking attack which saw thousands of internal emails and other documents released in an attempt to destabilise the vote.

In this case, Russia was accused of masterminding the attack, but Russia is only one of several countries that are known to be a source of politically motivated cyber-hacks. Up there too are the US, China, Iran, North Korea and Israel.

Migration to cloud services and the increasing use of data centers and colocation facilities has become more and more popular with local and national government departments in recent years for the storage of sensitive data. While these strategies help governments to take advantage of enormous economic and workflow advantages, they also herald a relinquishing of control of their data and they are increasingly dependent on the cloud or data center operator to implement the highest levels of security.

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Source: Vidder