The Real Threat Is Surprise Attacks

Please see my new article in Israel Defense called, "The Real Threat is Surprise Attacks."

The element of surprise can overcome most defenses. This can happen whether through an insider threat or through new and stealthy technologies. Already in August 2018, two explosive-laden drones were used to attack the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. Similarly, last year, in the movie, Angel Has Fallen, we saw the president of the United States attacked by a swarm of drones. While this is a great threat in and of itself, I believe that the greater threat lies in the miniaturization of the drones, in some cases, drones with the size, shape, and function of insects.

Unfortunately, Yigal Amir used the element of surprise to assassinate the prime minister of Israel. Now there are other high-tech threats like miniaturized, weaponized drones. There is no excuse for us not to be on the lookout for and to be prepared to defend against these, so that our leadership and our democracies are duly protected. Surprise is a big advantage in warfare, but we must be one step ahead, so that we are prepared to defend against these as well as to turn the tables and effectively employ the continued element of surprise against our relentless adversaries.

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

The Real Threat Is Surprise Attacks

We're Giving It All Away

Nice little video from Mandiant on "The anatomy of a cyber attack."

Despite the typical firewalls, antivirus, and intrusion detection system, cyber attacks can and do penetrate your systems.

This happens through social engineering (including phishing attempts), automated spam, and zero-day exploits.

Once inside your network, the cyber attacker takes command and control of your computers, surveys your assets, steals user names and passwords, hijacks programs, and accesses valuable intellectual property. 

Mandiant performs security incident response management (detecting breaches, containing it, and helping recovery efforts), and they are known for their report "APT1" (2013) exposing an alleged significant government-sponsored cyber espionage group that they state "has systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations."

Another fascinating report on a similar topic of advanced persistent threats was done by McAfee on Operation Shady Rat (2011) that reveals over 70 organizations (governments, commercial entities, and more) that were targeted over 5 years and had terabytes of information siphoned off. 

The overall risk from cyber espionage is high and the McAfee report states:

- "Every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact."

- "What we have witnessed...has been nothing short of a historically unprecedented transfer of [intellectual] wealth - closely guarded national secrets...disappeared in the ever-growing electronic archived of dogged adversaries."

In short we can't keep a secret--we're putting endless gobs and gobs of our information online and are not adequately protecting it in cyberspace, with the result that our adversaries are able to access, exfiltrate, disclose, modify, or destroy it.

In short, we're giving it all away - why? 

We're Giving It All Away