Companies Need to Take Anonymous's Threat Seriously - Expert

Akamai technologies has issued a statement warning that companies need to take the threat hacker groups like the Anonymous collective pose more seriously.

Speaking to the International Business Times UK, John Summers, vice president of Security Business at Akamai clarified the increased cyber threat collectives like Anonymous pose companies.

"The rise of the 'hactivist' community has certainly put web site and application security front and center in the discussion about how to best protect online businesses," said the Akamai representative.

"When the underlying motivation for an attack is ideological, it's less likely the attacker will quit when met with a little resistance. Attacks will be longer and will use a wider variety of methods - thus comprehensive protection, such as Kona Site Defender, that covers all possible attack types is critical. You need to be prepared to protect your sites and applications for a much longer period of attack - think siege mentality."

Akamai's comments come just after the company announced its Kona Site Defender software. The software is designed to protect websites from many of the Anonymous collective's standard attacks, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), SQL injection and cross site scripting assaults.

DDoS attacks attempt to force sites offline by overloading their networks with requests - tantamount to spamming a site to death - while SQL injections and cross site scripting assaults see hackers exploit design vulnerabilities to to deface or create new pages on the hacker's target.

Akamai is a leading cloud platform service that helps enterprises provide secure, user experiences across devices. The company reportedly helps manage in-excess of one-trillion web interactions per day. Akamai Kona Site Defender is to be made generally available on 11 April, 2012.

Operating off an open IRC channel, Anonymous allows any user to join and become a member, or "Anon" as they tend to refer to themselves. Though the information is far from official, Anonymous reportedly picks its targets in a democratic way, with participants in the chat putting forward their chosen target and arguing their case to the other members as to why the proposed target deserves Anonymous' attention.

On multiple occasions the hacktivist collective has successfully breached high-profile companies, law enforcement and military organisations including the FBI, Soca and numerous military contractors. More information about Anonymous's latest activities can be found on the International Business Times UK's Cyber Warfare section.