Corporate and MIS managers' fears are not without merit. At the congregation of the Internet Society in Honolulu this past June, Tsutomu Shimomura, network security consultant at the University of California at San Diego, showed a videotape of a hacker he tracked breaking into the systems at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet command. From start to finish, the assault took an impressively brief six minutes, and the hacker barely paused in his pursuit of war plans during the Gulf War. We also saw an assault on the systems at the Kennedy Space Center occur in an astonishingly brief time period. The audience was visibly uncomfortable.
Corporations are afraid.
IBM says it has signed up many of its largest customers, since CIOs prefer the first all-out attack to be a friendly one, but IBM is not eager to hand out customer names. The need for security on the Internet is shining the spotlight into the dusty corners of corporate networks. The need for security doesn't stop at the connections between your network and the outside world. Sensitive information within your company's walls needs protection and security as well. We as an industry have taken the wrong approach to security.