Hackers taking part in the Defcon conference in Las Vegas have said that corporations are ‘ridiculously easy' to attack. They claim that staff are poorly trained with security making it straightforward to plan a cyber attack against them.

Hackers at Defcon take part in weekend contests to test their skills and a report from Reuters said that the hackers taking part were able to get employees in corporate businesses to browse websites they suggested.

One of the hackers, a contestant, pretended to be an employee of an IT company and persuaded a genuine employee of a big business to pass over information related to their computer. With that information, the hacker could easily decide what was the best form of attack to breach the computer and enter the internal network.

Reuters reported that Chris Hadnagy, one of the organisers said “For me it was a scary call because she was so willing to comply, A lot of this could facilitate serious attacks if used by the right people.”

Defcon is a positive venture, as it can help expose security problems in companies and can even help improve the state of their security defences.

Hadnagy also said “Oracle was wiped”, was related to the fact that they gave away the most data in the test attacks. Other companies that were targeted included AT&T, Apple, Symantec and Sysco.

Kitguru says: With the array of attacks in the last year from high profile hacking organisations such as Lulzsec and Anonymous, it is very important that businesses start to tighten their security.

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