How prepared are you for Cyber Attacks?

The AFCOM association, whose members include 4,500 administrators from 3,900 data centers around the world surveyed  436 data center sites last year. Some of the findings of the survey indicated that cyberterrorism is an increasing concern, mainframe deployment is on the decline, storage deployment is on the rise, and “green” technologies are definitely happening.

It was found that there is a shift in data centers away from mainframe computers and toward other types of servers.Just less than 40 percent of data centers run two or more mainframes, with 45.7 percent of such data centers planning to replace at least one of their mainframes in the next year. However 33 percent of those replacing mainframes plan to replace them with other types of servers.

The more worrying fact that this study conducted in July2009 has brought to light is that 60.9 percent of data centers worldwide officially recognize cyberterrorism as a real threat but ironically only about one-third of respondents included cyber terrorism in their disaster-recovery plans. The survey has unveiled a major void in data centers in terms of securing its critical data against a very real possibility of cyber attacks.The report goes on to note that currently only about one of every four data centers addresses cyberterrorism, and one in five has procedures in place to prevent an attack. That means the remaining 4 out of five data centers are left dangerously vulnerable . The problem becomes more critical as several data centers expect massive expansion due to dramatic increase in storage demands and aggressive business plans in the next five years. The study finds that 22.0% will utilize a

The rest HERE

I find it funny that in most of the movies that have a “hacker” content, there is usually a heavy reference to the “Mainframe” as being the target of attacks. Of course in real life, the mainframe is not much more employed by companies to store data or perform functions, instead it’s all distributed or now “cloud” computing based on servers.

What’s even more laughable is that when I worked for IBM and they needed someone to do audits on mainframes they made me the “mainframe guy” by handing me some manuals and saying read up. I ended up performing assessments on Z and 360 systems on the fly really. Once I had done some AS400 as well I was the go to guy by everyone else. Me? Really? I am now an SME? HA!

In time I got more acquainted with the AS400 but man, being thrown into something on site is a pain in the ass.

Anyway, now we are talking about mainframes and cyberterror huh? Hmm, well I can see how this might be appealing. How many of the kiddies out there know Z systems or 360? For that matter AS400? So maybe there is a little security by obscurity there, but, not really. Nope, in the end, I only see the advantage in being that there aren’t too many people programming malware for these operating systems.

On average, when I looked at mainframes out there as an auditor I found them to be lacking utterly in security being turned on. Most of the time you had maybe one or two people who knew how to run them, but not at all securely. So, do I have hope that a mainframe is more “secure” in the case of a cyberwar?

No.

Of course, just how many Z systems are out there now with the security module added on?

No idea.

How many of these “clouds” I keep hearing about actually use mainframe technology and LPARS?

Well, look at the numbers above. Nearly 50% of the data centers are  offing their mainframes. This means that they will be running servers with either *NIX or, more likely, Microsoft.

*Shudder*

One would hope its the *NIX, but I can’t say for sure that will be the case.

Hmmm So IBM, did you maybe pay for this article?

Heh.

CoB