Six years ago, the cyber-attacks barely reached 25,000. Utah officials are saying that the number of cyber-attacks they’ve seen against local state organizations has grown exponentially in the past six years.
In a quote to KUTV, a Salt Lake City TV station, Keith Squires, Utah Commissioner of Public Safety, says things have evolved since 2010 when state agencies were reporting attacks that ranged between 25,000 and 80,000 per day.
Nowadays this number is dwarfed, being up in the millions, sometimes even reaching 300 million in a single day.
To blame for this escalation is the new data center the NSA has built near the city of Bluffdale. A couple of years back, right when the PRISM program reached its peak, Edward Snowden revealed the presence of the data center, and since then attacks have been constantly going up.
Mr. Squires says that most of these attacks are traced back to other countries, but that doesn’t guarantee that local hackers aren’t trying their luck as well.
Not all the attacks are aimed at the data centers themselves, public institutions seeing their own fair share of action. The reason is that while defenses are quite strong at the NSA facilities, they are not all over the state.
In most cases, hackers are trying to get a foothold anywhere on the local systems, with the purpose, and hope, of gathering information on how to target the NSA data center.
Source:https://news.softpedia.com/
Working as a cyber security solutions architect, Alisa focuses on application and network security. Before joining us she held a cyber security researcher positions within a variety of cyber security start-ups. She also experience in different industry domains like finance, healthcare and consumer products.
