Hackers attack number of businesses

Prague, March 11 (CTK) - The lost profits of Czech web servers, banks and telecommunication operators during the hackers' attack last week did not exceed 10 million crowns, a study by drafted the PwC consultancy firm has said.

The corporate internal costs directly associated with the fight against hackers were lower than one million crowns, the study said.

Czech companies are about to invest tens of million crowns in the fight against hackers, but they are still often vulnerable from inside, it added.

Director of the association NIC.CZ Ondrej Filip said the attacks had come from one direction, probably in Russia.

This is unusual because Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are mostly prepared in the way in which the demands on the hit network come from various sides, Filip said.

"The attacks we saw in recent past did not have to come necessarily from the computers infected with viruses, owned by the people who did not know anything," he added.

"They could have easily come from a single centre. They themselves were able to build such a centre in a few hours' time," Filip said.

Hackers attacked the websites of the T-Mobile and Telefonica mobile operators and they abused the ICMP and TCP protocols last week.

Some commercial banks in the Czech Republic, the Czech National Bank (CNB) and the Prague Stock Exchange (BCPP) faced a hackers' attack last Wednesday, but clients' accounts and data were not threatened.

Some news servers in the Czech Republic were also assaulted by hackers in recent days. All the assaults were the DDoS attacks.

Some firms are planning to spend much higher sums on the measures that are to prevent the pause of services in case of another hackers' attacks than the losses caused by the hackers, the study said.

Even the companies that have not been targeted by the attacks are about to make major investments, especially in the strengthening of their infrastructure, it adds.

The study drafted by PwC says that while the attacks took place with a large interest by the media, hackers are trying to get hold of sensitive data silently every day.

These are mainly attempts with the origin in China, Russia and the Far East targeted at America and Western Europe. Czech companies, too, face similar attacks, it adds.

($1=19.436 crowns)