Cyber warfare News & Analysis

Cyber Battle Fatigue Is Real – So What Should Organizations Do?

There is much concern about the realities of “Cyber Battle Fatigue” – a condition resulting from a never-ending process of defending networks and sensitive information from an onslaught of cyber attacks conducted by cyber criminals, cyber espionage actors, and hacktivists. These attackers continue to use a wide variety of tactics, tools, and procedures that span from being unsophisticated to very sophisticated and continue to have more successes than failures. Two things are certain in a constantly-changing domain – that no business that operates online is immune to being targeted, and two, the cyber security talent pool is sparse, and is contributing to the cyber battle fatigue reality.

The numbers are staggering and continue to outperform previous activity. In 2017, ransomware attacks demonstrated how prolific just one type of attack was. The WannaCry outbreak impacted computers in more than 150 countries that cost approximately USD $ 4 billion. According to one U.S. IT Company, in 2017, some notable cybercrime statistics illustrate the challenges facing those network defenders:

Russia and China Are Making their Information Security Case

in December 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a new information security doctrine, which updates the older 2000 version. The doctrine, a system of official views on the insurance of the national security of the country in the information sphere, regards the main threats to Russia’s security and national interest from foreign information making its way into the country, and sets priorities for countering them.

IoT DDoS – When Will We Learn?

In late September and late October 2016 two massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks successfully targeted and impacted the operations of their targets. In the October DDoS against Dyn, a cloud-based Internet Performance Management company, several high profile organizational websites (Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, to name a few ) for a substantial part of the day. While Dyn was ultimately able to mitigate the three-wave attack, it did impact users’ abilities to access these sites.