http://ctovision.com/2008/10/melissa-hathaway-op-ed-on-cyber-security/
London shoppers who bought groceries with bankcards over the last two years paid a higher price than they bargained for.
Cyber
thieves had implanted unauthorized circuitry in keypads sold to
supermarkets in the Barking and Dagenham area of the British capital.
The corrupted keypads were then used to capture account information and
Personal Identification Numbers (PINs). The data were siphoned off and
used to skim from or in some cases empty shoppers’ bank accounts.
The thieves covered their tracks by encrypting the
numbers they stole, then storing them on a computer server abroad. It
took more than a year for the authorities to catch on.
Stories such as that aren’t only sobering news for
consumers. For folks charged with securing and protecting the nation’s
defense and intelligence infrastructure, however, increasingly
sophisticated cyber assaults are a chilling — and increasingly
familiar — challenge.
The same devices that thieves use to sneak into bank
accounts, the same techniques that hackers use to disrupt Internet
service or alter a digital profile, are being used by foreign military
and spy services to besiege information systems that are vital to our
nation’s defense.