Recently the worldwide known group of “Anonymous” Hackers reported that attacked Angolan Government websites, leaving them inaccessible for a while. According to the group's official publication, this invasion of Angolan websites came to demand the immediate release of political prisoners (the 15 + 2 case) and calling for freedom of expression and more equality in the country.
But we must take into account that the Anonymous group hacking around the world offers some good lessons for corporate IT, since the excellent connections and public power that the Internet has made facilitates many situations today, but the very elements that power have difficulties in controlling it.
But after all, what is the lesson that IT departments in Angola should take from the Anonymous Group?
Anonymous's strength has been its success in recruiting large numbers of programmers from around the world. One attribute that many of these programmers share is that it probably made Anonymous interesting to them initially. Usually in these types of groups there are specialists for everything, which causes excellence in their work.
Nowadays it is believed that in the IT departments of Angolan companies, not always there is qualified personnel, ideally, to have at least one expert in each key area of IT in which the department encounters more challenges, from Programmers, Helpdesk, Web Manager and the most essential: a Network Security Technician (no matter how small the company).
From the moment we have a web page on the air, a server on which information is stored, one must be very careful about security, and in my opinion the Angolan Government sites are not very secure and there are not many trained personnel to face an Anonymous Dimension Group.
Therefore, we must focus more on human resources and specialize them in the different areas, especially those already working in the management of Angolan sites, because before the attack we were not considered vulnerable. But now our weakness has been demonstrated.
At least this was one of the attacks that warned about the vulnerability of Angolan websites, and the country should show more efforts so that situations like this do not happen again…
Forewarned is worth two.
