Sydney, 1 March 2012 – Speaking today at the inaugural Cybercrime Symposium, Ty Miller, CTO of Pure Hacking outlined that the data cyber war against Australian business had increased markedly in the first months of 2012. Australia’s leading specialist information security consultancy has already supported its client base against a tripling of targeted attacks and cautions that the incidence and outcome of cybercrime in Australia will only continue to escalate.

According to Miller the rise in cybercrime levels and the intended outcome of these attacks in 2012 indicates a trend towards hackers relying on the more familiar penetration methods to achieve a goal of taking an organisation permanently offline.

“We are not identifying extremely complex data attacks that only an elite hacker could attempt. Rather hackers are focusing on the more common SQL Injection attack methods, with a slight move towards DDoS extortion attempts and a recent shift to 0day exploits,” Miller outlined.

“However the success rate for hackers is increasing with the growth of a global hacking community. At times we are seeing the tools necessary for a hack being downloaded by tens of thousands of end users in a very short period of time,” he said.

Miller also disputed the myth that smaller hacks or defacements were less disruptive to day-to-day business operations and Information Technology budgets.

“The same actions and risk management procedures must be undertaken for any successful penetration into a corporate network, often resulting in a significant budget impact to IT departments and risk management procedures and solutions. Based on our experience with clients already this year, it is imperative that elements of information security are now moved into the necessary rather than optional category. This particularly applies to any Web Application Firewall device,” he concluded.

Pure Hacking is currently extending its services to meet the needs of its client base to better protect and manage information security events and intends on rolling out a range of new offerings over the coming months.