Security in the Economic World|total Security

 The challenges of information security in the economic world

I have chosen to focus my remarks on a reflection around what we can call: the challenges of information security in the economic world. This is what your students approach during their studies under the term "economic intelligence". This fairly recent concept addresses the use of useful information intended for economic players and has a strategic function for companies; its purpose is the competitiveness and security of your country's economy.

To illustrate my point, I will first come back to the revelations published in the world some time ago by the Wikileaks affair, a website well known for its revelations of confidential Pentagon military reports. As you know, this site unveiled, in 2010, more than 250,000 diplomatic telegrams classified as top-secret or confidential-defense. This being known, protecting the information assets of your companies is now at the heart of economic intelligence. Moreover in France the National Council of Engineers and Scientists of France (CNISF) even proposed to include in the penal code and the labor code the concept of economic secrecy.

So, in this context, how to manage information within the company?

Information must be considered as an element of performance in the company, it therefore represents a product of values   generated by sharing and exchange. But, we are faced with a dilemma because, beyond its authenticity, information within the company must remain both confidential and available. Thus, depending on its value, information can become sensitive or even strategic, and therefore linked to the notion of secrecy, because it represents a key factor that affects the entire economy ...

It then becomes an economic asset which must be protected and secured in a current context which complicates its protection. And Moreover, we too often forget that the survival of an entire company depends on the confidentiality of the thousands of information and data it generates. In this sense, new technologies have influenced all practices; especially since it is increasingly difficult to distinguish what must remain secret from what can be accessible to all. Recent technological developments give information systems a role of infrastructure for society, since the very functioning of the State, and therefore of a country, turns out to be dependent on the availability of electronic infrastructures which include integrity. and the authenticity of the information as the basis for all the services available.

We must, however, keep in mind that, on the one hand, even if certain data are considered individually insensitive, their aggregation can give the whole a very significant strategic or economic value; and on the other hand, the phenomenal quantities of information processed by our systems no longer allow us to rely on conventional techniques. Thus, the availability and management of archives over time, both for access to these data and for their control, are part of major developments to be taken into account both technically and legally. To that,

The generalization of the Internet has completely changed the use of computers, and allows what is now called nomadism, at the origin of new risks. Indeed, the multiplication of wireless links (modems, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.) amplifies the threat to data confidentiality and modifies the availability of services; Obviously, mobile terminals will be used more and more massively by the new generations of executives and managers. The problem raised by the Wikileaks affair shows that no information, no matter how secret, is completely protected. Closer to home, we can cite the computer attack, suffered by the French Ministry of Finance by the intrusion of a Trojan horse lodged in a simple attachment in PDF format: this attack infected 150 posts of the ministry and the consequences remain to this day poorly evaluated. The example of the Bercy affair is the illustration of the passage to another level of gravity: cyber-attacks go beyond the villainous framework to, via this cyber-espionage, achieve political and economic motivations and ends that affect the sphere of international competition.

The explosion of social networks is therefore a real danger for companies, as many specialists in the security of information systems have shown. Among the best known, of course, Facebook or Twitter; these networks are now at the center of the daily activities of millions of Internet users and are a prime target for hackers. The users of these networks are their first targets, as they are able to generate data and information leaks without their knowledge. Facebook, for example, has more than a billion active members worldwide total security.

By delivering messages, for the most part innocuous, internet employees do not understand the scope of their actions. By replying to an email or by clicking on a hypertext link received by a correspondent, one can download malicious software (malware); who realizes that only 6.21% of the messages he receives, on average, are real emails, and that all the others could be classified as spam, with all the risks of intrusion and hacking that this entails for company information systems? More than 90% of all messages received on corporate messaging servers around the world are therefore suspect. Beyond the loss of time and productivity, it is essential to be able to apprehend these serious threats.

Beyond the phenomenon of social engineering, many other malicious methods are on the rise on social networks: Malware (malware), Spyware (spyware), Botnets (infected and remotely programmed computers), Trojans , viruses, etc. are more efficient every day and can attack, at any moment, the information systems of companies and States to seize personal data, banking, confidential information resulting from the work of employees and directors. It should be noted that even if the web remains a favorite ground, the threats which propagate via the attachments and the hypertext links integrated in the body of the messages were the two methods most used in 2009 by the hackers;