When asked about Super Bowl XLI, most casual fans will remember the rain soaked classic in Miami that featured Peyton Manning leading the Indianapolis Colts to his first championship. But for those in the cyber-security industry, the game stood out for another, less-publicized reason.
Just days before kickoff, some of the Dolphins’ websites were found to be compromised by malware and were infecting users’ devices as well. Given the timing of the attack, the websites were receiving heavy traffic prior to the Super Bowl. The solution proved to be costly both in terms of time and dollars. Amit Ashbel is the Director of Product Marketing at Checkmarx, a company that seeks to help implement security features at the earliest stages of software development. We spoke to Ashbel about how the company, founded in 2006 shortly before the Dolphins’ hack, is working with developers to ensure that hackers don’t have a way to attack their software in similar ways in today’s even more technologically advanced times.
“While the software industry has been dealing with security risks for a couple of decades already, these new players are not always addressing security properly at first, thus leaving a fertile attack surface for attackers,” Ashbel said, referring to the growth of apps and software in sports and sports media. “Protecting the code at the initial design stage is probably the largest advantage an organization has over the hacker (access to the code itself).”
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