Cyber Security Attacks are the mainstay – they come from every nation in the WORLD! It would appear that even the smallest, most obscure countries are cited as having cyber warfare capabilities. Attacks are fairly common on individuals, on identity theft, on governments and the military. Electrical grids are also a fairly common target, but this past Christmas was the first time that the attack on a grid was successful. It happened in Ukraine, and the malmare took out 3 towers and shut down electricity to 700,000 residences.
While the intention was for the attack to occur during the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day celebrations, apparently the hackers didn’t know that Ukraine celebrates Orthodox Christmas on January 7th. This would indicate the hackers were not informed of Ukrainian customs, ie Orthodox Christianity.
Security ‘experts’ love to point fingers as to who is the Hacking Team, when even in some of the more unsophisticated instances the source could not be determined. Speculations are rampant and usually refer to whomever is the latest craze of bad guy. There was never any evidence to support the Sony hack coming from North Korea, but they are a bad guy and so the US accepted the accusation as proof positive.
I imagine the hackers get quite a laugh at the schoolkid routines, ‘who’s on first’ type of deductive reasoning.
There is a hacking tool readily available online that allows the user to hack an auto’s controlboard. It costs $25. This is something anyone can utilize. And most likely have.
For years, individuals in Ukraine were hacking into hundreds of US companies giving them insider information for Wall Street trades. They made over $100 million, it took an informant to get the US onboard despite a trail of cyber attacks, and four of the men involved have still not been found. That is not – good.
It’s a schoolyard bullying tactic of you hack me and I hack you back times 10. The US hacks and nothing, Germany, France, UK, China, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ukraine, EVERYONE has joined the party. So what can a country do? It can upgrade its poor systems and hire the best of the best to mitigate and try to be one step ahead at the very least. But everything we do, everything we own, everything that comprises our daily life is now governed by computers vulnerable to hackers.
Russia claims that the slippery slope of cyber warfare included 57 million attacks it suffered last year. Government officials are banned from using Google and WhatsApp as a result and Russia has begun the process of creating its own parallel networks to operate alongside the public internet in order to safeguard from attacks levied from ‘abroad’. This will serve to enhance security while allowing global connectivity.
The US still lives within a punitive instead of solution based reaction. Sanctions against countries appear to our deterrent, which of course, has absolutely no effect whatsoever because a) we don’t know who is really doing the hacking and b) the countries just don’t care anymore – sanctions are primitive at best.
While we threatened China and we threatened Russia and we threatened North Korea, we didn’t threaten anyone else. Why? Have our threats resulted in a lessening of attacks? Not even close!
When we know that cyber warfare is very real and very threatening, why don’t we acknowledge that it can come from within our allies, ourselves, our coups, and beyond? What good is sanctioning? It attempts to define an evil and thus give us a source of hatred, but it doesn’t – solve the problem!
It’s the same logic we use when looking at inserting Muslims into assimilation within the US. While we say that not letting them in will only give them the impetus to join ISIS, we fail to understand that isn’t a good deterrent… as in promise you won’t behead us and we’ll let you live off welfare forever.
Our logic has and is failing miserably.
How is it that we, the greatest economy in the world, are failing at cyber warefare? For one thing, we didn’t anticipate, we saw the threat as small, and we underestimated its potential. Trying to catch up to our competitors when they are far advanced in their IT capabilities is much like chasing a flood with one sandbag. It might deter one or two drops, but the damn – she is a flooding!
In the meantime – pointing fingers and slapping on sanctions is like swatting a dinosaur with a flyswatter. Ain’t going to happen.