Q&A: Inside a Massive Data Breach

The big news out of the IT security world yesterday was that NetWitness, a Herndon, Va.-based IT security firm, uncovered a new hacking attack that successfully targeted 2,500 companies and government agencies, leaving large amounts of sensitive data susceptible to theft.Over at our sister publication Bank Systems & Technology, Penny Crosman has an exclusive interview with Alex Cox, the principal analyst at NetWitness that discovered the attack.

From Bank Systems & Technology:

BS&T: What can banks do to prevent botnets from accessing their systems?

Cox: Even though a 75,000-node botnet is not huge, most breaches in the past two years have started with a single PC being compromised. Once a criminal has a PC inside your network, he can then pivot off of that PC to other machines and extend his reach inside your network. So even if you're on this list and have only one bot, that one bot could be the key to the castle. They can then use that to get further in and do a massive, Heartland-class break-in.

You can read the full interview with Alex Cox here.