Mr. Lawson added, however, that as insurers move more and more information to the Internet, the danger from hackers increases. These include NASA, the Purdue University School of Management, the Malaysian government, the Ku Klux Klan and, ironically, the National District Attorneys Association. The hacker claimed to want to let others know about potential security breaches in such systems. This was in the pursuit of knowledge. A group of hackers commandeered The New York Times Web site in September 1998, according to Laurie Wagner, senior vice president at ICSA, Inc., a Reston, Va.-based computer security company.
Credibility is also an important issue, especially for insurers.
He pointed out that one insurance company has policies on both President Bill Clinton and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. And while insurers aren't prime hacker targets at the moment, there are certainly individuals who bear grudges against insurance companies and might try to sabotage them in the future. Not all threats to computer systems and Web sites come from outside the enterprise, however. Industrial spies have many ways of getting into systems, according to ICSA's Ms. Wagner, who spoke at the recent Cyber Insurance 2000 conference in New York sponsored by the Institute for International Research. Often, they will get a job at a target company, then look for ways to access the company's systems.