DailyPost 820
ENTIRE COUNTRIES OFFLINE?
The hackers who get into websites of banks or stores, steal personal information or money now seem to the simpletons of the hacking world. The hackers which all of us need to worry today are the fellows who are trying and also have the capability to bring countries offline. The problem lies in the older electronics and sensors that control processes in infrastructure and industry. The hackers who are really scary are the ones who are trying to bring down internet, electric grids, water supply, disable railways or blow up factories. What does the affected country do in return; launch nukes but you should know who has done it.
Just few persons in one corner of the world can have as devastating an impact as weapons of mass destruction. The two unnerving events of 2017 / 2018 has been a denial of service attack, the biggest internet outage ever in history. In December 2017 this attack was able to black out web access from most parts of US and major portions of Northern Europe for about 12 hours. Dyn’s Domain Name System services was disabled bringing in this collapse. Again in April 2018, a similar internet outage was experienced by Mauritania making it go offline for two days. This happened as someone cut the undersea cable that serves the internet.
As the story unfolded both the attacks have been the handiwork of amateurs in this field. The Dyn attack was orchestrated by one of it’s competitors to disable them, but unfortunately went out of control. The second attack the Mauritanian one was the work of neighbouring Seirra Leone which wanted to manipulate the elections, ended up crippling the media. It’s been made crystal clear that it is possible to take the world offline. “Someone is learning to take down the Internet,” Bruce Shneier, the CTO of IBM Resilient believes.
“Multiple Someones” want to learn this art. In June 2018 Atlanta’s city govt’s one third of the software programs were wiped out in an attack. FBI told Business Insider that terrorists would eventually attempt to take America’s 911 emergency system offline. Digital age reality is that you don’t need bombs to bring a country to it’s knees.
CYBER PREDOMINANCE IS A COMBINATION OF TECHNOLOGY ENABLED GROWTH AND HAVING EFFECTIVE DEFENSIVE & OFFENSIVE CAPABILITIES.
Sanjay Sahay