Raytheon started selling missiles to Taiwan about five years ago, and not long afterward the company's network was the target of a barrage of attacks. The sequence of events spurred the defense contractor to take a new look at its network security and where it fits in its priority list, reports Jeremy Kirk at Computerworld.

"For some reason, a country next door to Taiwan didn't really like that so they got very interested in our IPR [intellectual property rights]," said Vincent Blake, head of cybersecurity at Raytheon U.K. "We've had to very, very rapidly catch up with our own internal networks."

Today, Raytheon counts 1.2 billion network attacks daily, including 30,000 Advanced Persistent threats or sneaky malware. Zero-day attacks are a major source of trouble, and in 2010 the company detected 138 of them via a technology that combs through email attachments and embedded URLs.

Recently, two Raytheon employees clicked on a malicious email link in a spear phishing attack. The link brought them to an application hosted in the cloud, but when the computer began "beaconing" to the service provider, Blake's team detected it.  The goal is to allow attackers to hover on the Raytheon network for no more than 10 minutes, he said.

"You will be attacked," Blake said. "You will be exploited. It's not a matter of whether something will get in your system, but more how long you will continue to have them in your system."

For more, see:
- Jeremy Kirk's article at Computerworld

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