New Horizons Blog and Resources

Hacking today is, for the most part, run by large organized criminal gangs. Hacking generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue for these gangs. Because so much money is involved, these organizations can invest in developing new attacks and in finding ways around your defenses. These targeted attacks, sometimes called Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), can be nearly impossible to detect and avoid. Many targeted attacks focus on individual users’ computers since they can then be used to gain access to data on servers. Let’s look at one of the most common targeted attacks, spear phishing attacks.

Among the different types of computer applications, web applications are unusually exposed to attacks by hackers. First, they must be connected to the internet, making them an easily reachable target. Hackers prefer to sit thousands of miles away, preferably in a place with no extradition to the U.S., while compromising your web application security completely uninhibited.

Many things in life are the victims of “Hollywood education”, where things as shown in movies and tv shows don’t work that way in the real world. For example, in Hollywood cars burst into flames and spectacular explosions in mid-air, for no apparent reason. In real life, car crashes only occasionally cause fires, and then only after impact. In this blog, we'll discuss two common misconceptions associated with hacking and shed some light on how hacking works.