By Liviu Arsene, Senior EThreat Analyst at Bitdefender
Cybersecurity has become a major topic of
discussion for businesses and
organisations of all sizes, as the number of
security incidents has spiked, capturing
headlines worldwide. This year, even
presidential candidates and campaigns will
likely join the discussion, as 64% of
registered U.S. voters believe cyberattacks
will undoubtedly plague election
campaigns, according to a study from
Experian.
If until now the cybersecurity landscape
was somewhat uniformly distributed
between activism and public shaming,
today’s cyberattacks are either financially
motivated or state-sponsored, and aim to
steal state secrets or cripple critical
infrastructure. Politically motivated cyberattacks seem to have been at the heart of
the Ukraine cyberattack on its power grid
during the Russian-sponsored conflict
there in late 2015.
Cyberattacks Can Hit Anyone and Anything
Even if they’re targeting a government or
private organisation, cyberattacks can hit
individuals, especially public figures,
celebrities or otherwise politically engaged
people. The “Celebgate” iCloud leak is a
notorious example from 2014 when more
than 500 private and nude pictures of
celebrities were leaked to the internet in
one the most controversial phishing scams
in the past couple of years. With social
engineering at the heart of it, the incident
prompted a massive investigation fallout
and public debate on whether people
should even be looking at the pictures and
urging authorities to apprehend the
cybercriminal.
A more recent attack on an individual’s
public image has to do with Anonymous
declaring “war” on Donald Trump, one of
the candidates for the Republican
nomination for President of the United
States in the 2016 election. The hacker
group openly started a campaign
against Trump, threatening to
find and post all personal and
sensitive information they
can find on him.
“The single biggest
existential threat that’s
out there, I think, is
cyber”
Michael Mullen,
retired United States Navy Admiral
Hospitals have also been the target of
malware – particularly ransomware. In
February 2016, the 434-bed Hollywood
Presbyterian Medical Center stated they
had to pay the equivalent of $17,000 in
bitcoins, to hackers who seized their
computers and encrypted all data on them.
While at first the cybercriminals demanded
$3.4 million to restore access to the
hospital’s computers, a negotiation took
place to release them for a smaller amount.
Even operating systems believed less
susceptible to malware have been kneeled
by ransomware attacks. Linux was the one
to be hit by Linux.Encoder – the Linux
version of the ransomware threat – in late
2015, and in early March 2016 Apple OS X
was targeted. The unprecedented Mac
ransomware threat is believed to have
affected thousands of users, as the
infected application was estimated to have
been downloaded by more than 6,000
users.
While the Linux variant was relatively easy
to crack, as security researchers were able
to provide a tool to offer free decryption of
the infected files, it stands to reason that
cybercriminals will improve the threat to
make it more difficult – even impossible –
for the researchers to decrypt the files.