Nawaf Bitar, SVP & General Manager, Security Business Unit at Juniper Networks spoke at the RSA Conference in San Francisco earlier in March that The Next World War will be Fought in Silicon Valley. That we are under attack and that we are not allowed to fight back. This is a new digital war. Everyone has a breaking point. What is yours?
Interestingly, with the recent developments we have seen Ukrainian and Russian hackers attacking various institutions in support of their cause, creating further disruption.
Examples of recent articles in major news sites (such as BBC and Reuters) demonstrate how cyber attacks are used to attack different institutions. For example: Russia and Ukraine in cyber 'stand-off', Hackers down Russian presidential site in ‘powerful cyber-attack’ & NATO websites hit in cyber attack linked to Crimea tension. We now also see North & South Korea embarking on a similar path of cyber warfare. Question of North Koreas cyber war capabilities , North Korea target cashpoints in South
What is it that we see happening? The primary use case of the Cyber Attacks we see they are mainly DDoS attacks (Denial of Service Attacks). There are also examples of how mobile phones are exploited to prohibit the end user from using its phone. One can only wonder what happens with the personal integrity and information stored on that mobile device.
It only proves that active defence is becoming a critical component of mitigating attacks in business and on users’ devices.
In a recent RAND Study commissioned by Juniper, it clearly states that the ability to attack will by far outpace the ability to defend. We need to change the economics of hacking and find ways to disrupt the value chains that result in these successful attacks. At Juniper we believe that Active Defence, a process of actively identifying and disrupting attackers on organizations networks can make hacking more expensive and time consuming.
What measures do you take to gain active defence?