CONFIDENTIAL

F5 Focus Group: Politically Motivated Hackers

February 2011

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F5 Focus Group Details

• 9 senior IT security participants from telecom, finance, hosting and retail industries.

• Focused on threat of attacks similar to those related to the WikiLeaks controversy.

• Discussion also included how to prepare for similar attacks.

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Highlights of the Focus Group

• Attacks in general are increasing, but DDoS attacks are not new.

• The WikiLeaks attacks did have new aspects:– Motivation for attacks was not financial, but political.– Participants willingly gave hackers access to their

machines to carry out the attack.

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Quotes from Focus Group Participants

“Whenever we are in the mediaor customers are in the media, that makes us a target.”

—Senior security architect of a large financial institution

“We’ve been seeing an uptick in attacks over the last year or so, but I don’t think I could attribute any of it to WikiLeaks.”

—Senior architect of an electronic publishing company

“We’re involved in watching discussions and code sharing and chat groups.”

—Director of security services for a large communication solutions provider

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Quotes from Focus Group Participants

“We made sure that our Internet service providers have the capability to block these attacks… so we can keep serving our customers.”

—Senior security architect of a large financial institution

“We had some content we put out that angered some groups a couple of years ago, and they attacked us pretty strongly.”

—Senior technology architect for an electronic publishing company

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Securing Your Network Against Attacks

• Create a plan with your ISP to block malicious traffic.

• Pay attention to the social networking landscape.

• Security software needs to handle attacks on multiple levels (i.e. networks & apps).