But isn't it ironic that blackhats bent on data theft so rarely cause system outages?
We have no way of knowing this. If a blackhat smashes your system to crap, you won't know what caused it. Maybe things just broke. I once permanently lost a machine to the ping of death (the hard reboot was the straw that broke the camel's back) and only knew about it because the entire dorm got hit by the ping of death. If I had been targeted it would have just been the machine dying on me. Which happens to me anyway. [1]
But if the whitehat scans your system at 4:52AM and your system breaks at 4:52AM, then you will know exactly what happened.
And knowing exactly what ports are open is information that is really valuable to a client. An external audit can find what insiders are too busy to pay attention to.
Comments
But isn't it ironic that blackhats bent on data theft so rarely cause system outages?
We have no way of knowing this. If a blackhat smashes your system to crap, you won't know what caused it. Maybe things just broke. I once permanently lost a machine to the ping of death (the hard reboot was the straw that broke the camel's back) and only knew about it because the entire dorm got hit by the ping of death. If I had been targeted it would have just been the machine dying on me. Which happens to me anyway. [1]
But if the whitehat scans your system at 4:52AM and your system breaks at 4:52AM, then you will know exactly what happened.
And knowing exactly what ports are open is information that is really valuable to a client. An external audit can find what insiders are too busy to pay attention to.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4900688