(Photo via CGTN)
It seems like even the largest Internet companies cannot prevent security breeches on its own anymore, as experts around the world gather in Beijing to call for deeper and wider cooperation against hacking attempts like the WannaCry incident.
The experts are attending the two-day Cyber Security Summit 2017 at the China National Conference Center, which started today.
Notable persons present include legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick, Vladimir Dashchenko at Kaspersky Lab and Ellen Richey, chief risk officer at credit card issuer VISA.
How to easily hack into a bank
Kevin Mitnick, once a black-hat hacker that was put into jail, now acts as a white-hat one to help companies defend itself from hacking attempts. He showcased on stage how to breach into a bank step by step.
First he used an NFC reader to copy the entry card of a bank employee to get into the bank building, and then used a weakness within Apple’s FileVault encryption to get the password to the employee’s working computer.
Details about the hacking was fully recorded in a CGTN live event.
Cooperation ‘desperately needed’
During a discussion at the summit, three words were mentioned by nearly all the security experts on stage.
The first one is ransomware, as WannaCry became the most serious cyber security event in recent years.
Second is law. China’s first cyber security law went into effect on June 1 this year, one which every network expert in China wanted to know more about.
The third and most important one is cooperation. Experts from China, US and Russia are all calling the world to cooperate with each other to prevent hackers from causing more damage.
Companies can predict cyber crimes before they even happen when they have the information from local police and other organizations, Richey said during her keynote speech.
She gave the example of how VISA and its customers found a potential breech even before an actual hack happened. When the company saw a security alert in their own system, they provided the source IP address to their customers, one of whom accidentally found that its system had similar security alert in the backend of its website.
“Cooperation is desperately needed to prevent hacking loss,” Richey told the conference.
The Cyber Security Summit is an annual event held by Tencent, one of China's largest Internet companies. The summit invites world leading white-hat hackers to discuss the latest cyber security trends, like how to make mobile payment safe.
