What Lockheed Martin Cyber Attack Must Teach Nigeria – Security Readiness Must Correlate With ICT Penetration

The US defense giant, Lockheed Martin, was hit by cyber attackers, Yahoo News has reported. Because Yahoo News links do expire, we have to put the contents below:

Hackers launched a “significant and tenacious” cyber attack on Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor holding highly sensitive information, but its secrets remained safe, the company said Saturday.

 

Lockheed Martin, the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon confirmed that the contractor’s information systems had come under attack. Lt. Col. April Cunningham, speaking for the Defense Department, said the impact on the Pentagon “is minimal and we don’t expect any adverse effect.”

 

Still, the concerted attempt to breach the contractor’s systems underscored the risk to the nation’s critical defense data. Chris Ortman, Homeland Security spokesman, said his agency and the Pentagon were working with the company to determine the breadth of the attack and “provide recommendations to mitigate further risk.”

 

Now, if this attack has happened in Nigeria, what would have happened?  Read Lockheed Martin:

 

Lockheed Martin said in a statement that it detected the May 21 attack “almost immediately” and took countermeasures. As a result, “our systems remain secure; no customer, program or employee personal data has been compromised.” The company’s security team is still working to restore employee access to the targeted network. Neither Lockheed Martin nor the federal agencies revealed specifics of the attack.

 

This company reacted immediately and took care of the problem.  If the Nigerian security agency was under this attack, do we have a chance. When group of guys in Nigeria attacked some federal websites, it took some of them 24 hours to even know that their sites had been compromised despite the fact that the news was all over the blog-sphere. In this case, you are supposed to be the one that will identify that.

How secure is our national data? As ICT is deployed across all areas of our economy, we need to take a hard look at security. This is simply important. If we build without a security plan, we will suffer huge consequences in this age of cyber warfare.