I have been in this career for more than 10 years now, and it seems like we still are at square one. It was back in 1970-1995 when Kevin Mitnick had an advantage since he was a groundbreaking hacker before the little script kids that are now surfacing up the scene. Mitnick penetrated the most high profile network using social engineering schemes. He once tricked the insiders by revealing access codes and passwords. This is now called phishing, which is also automated, gosh I miss those days.
In 1988 Morris worms started making the news. What started as a playful exercise and launched from a computer lab at MIT ended much faster than it was anticipated. Robert Morris was the first one to violate computer abuse and fraud activity.
In 2011 things took a steep turn and shifted gears, when Stuxnet worms entered. This was the first weaponized attack when it targeted Iran’s nuclear program. This also caused physical damage to their uranium enrichment and was not done by a lone hacker or a script kiddie but was a collective effort of a nation-state.
The Internet is growing, Can we Control it?
If we have a global network which was once designed to be safe and secure, then came the year 2000 when the dot com boom happened, and things took a distinct turn. Ecommerce was born and the ability to put all our medical records, military secrets, educational history, and banking records online. Everything today is online, and there is a need for the network which is designed to keep everything secure.
It is only natural to think that greed has led to the cybersecurity dilemma, but how can we ignore the security in our quest to make the most money? Are security and privacy just too much inconvenient to consumers?
There are a lot of targets for a cybercriminal, IoT (Internet of Things) can snoop a baby monitor or home security system and can also compromise your bank details and much more. As per PrivacyRights, there is a total of 4,383,810,342 users and the records breached until now since 2005 is 11,578,188,519.
I have now lost the count, let’s be modest and commoditize the information whenever another breach happens. It is more like saying that it’s a routine and we are so numb even to feel what is happening around us just like the violence on the evening news.
What is the Solution?
The 2019 Verizon’s data breach taught us some important lessons, and its investigation report looks like this;
- 90% of the malware arrived from email.
- C-Suites executives are twelve-time more likely to be targeted in an engineered attack than other employees.
- The phishing attack was involved in 32% of the data breaches and also in the 78% of the cyber-espionage cases.
- Nation attacks increased from 12% in 2017 to a staggering 23% in 2018.
- Most email threat attacks resulted in the data breaches of the multi-factor authentication
- 34% of the attack involved insiders, and 43% of the cyber-attacks targeted small business.
I can’t and should not speak for all nations but my home country, the USA, is siloed to cybersecurity and is hurting. In Europe, privacy is considered a human right, which is not mentioned in the US constitution. However, it does show up in the 4th amendment under illegal search seizures.
Another issue which damps the ability to secure user data is mostly unknown to the data brokers. We know that these brokers have free reign in the US, and the profits seem to be more worthy than the citizen’s privacy to Congress.
The lobbyists often come to work for corporations including the data brokers who in return, fund the congressional elections. This gives them the power to manipulate our government and its laws.
We know where we have been and in which circumstances or condition we are working, there is no comprehensive laws that address security and privacy for businesses across the nation. Should the US do the right thing and take measures that even are under special interests of marketers and cyber activists.
After all, until when will we be embracing the Darwinian approach to cybersecurity and win the race without the expense of being global data feeding frenzy?
Will We Continue To Ignore Cybersecurity?
Why have we made progress in the cybersecurity domain so lately? Congress is just too busy fighting for itself and making laws that are for our country. This behavior is unproductive and wasteful while the endless fighting and division continue and the cybercriminals don’t work in the silos to be happy to continue to exploit the banks, military secrets and medical records plus the intellectual property.
In the end, we must decide what we serious at, especially about cybersecurity and privacy, will continue to go down the path of ignorance and survive the game of fittest in the match happening 24/7 to take everything that we have.
We will do the obvious thing, wouldn’t we?
