As “cyber cold war” heats up, U.S. seeks new ways to deal with threats

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Published in ITProProtocl on April, 10 2018, by Raz Rafaeli

What are some steps that companies can take to secure themselves against this threat?

The Cyber Cold War is upon us.

While Great Powers would once clash via proxies on real-world battlefields, today, the fight has shifted to the digital arena.

This has changed the nature of the game in a few important ways. First, it has opened the door for exponentially more players. Might used to be measured in military hardware. Today it’s measured in cyber prowess. This means that weak nations, even economically and technologically backward ones, are now able to become formidable adversaries.

Take the cyber threat posed by North Korea. Over the past several years, Pyongyang has slowly developed its cyber army, funding shadow hacker groups such as the Lazarus, a group that has been implicated in several high profile hacks from the past decade. North Korea’s cyber capabilities made headlines after both the American and British intelligence communities confirmed that the country was behind the WannaCry epidemic of last May. WannaCry began as a single infection of ransomware, most likely in a port located somewhere in Asia, and quickly spread to affect tens of thousands of systems around the globe, including those of the British National Health Service (NHS). The lack of access to vital data meant that many hospitals were rendered largely inoperable, and thousands of patients were turned away. WannaCry took the North Korean threat to a different level. The operation demonstrated that North Korea’s hackers were able to affect more than data security, and could extend the consequences of their attacks to the real world. As Thomas P. Bossert, assistant to President Trump for homeland security and counter-terrorism put it, “the consequences and repercussions of WannaCry were beyond economic. These disruptions put lives at risk.”

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