Cyber Warfare and the future of Cyber Security

Mohit Singh General 888

The battlefield of war in the 21st Century has been shifted to our IT systems and no one can escape this digital battlefield. Now we don’t need a missile to destroy a country’s infrastructure, a good hacker can easily enter your server and can stop your vital infrastructures like electricity grid, a missile launch system, power plants and much more.

The number of cloud services, software products, servers and IT products are constantly increasing day by day and the number of connected systems will explode in few years, thus it is increasing the vulnerability of our IT Networks.

What is Cyber Warfare?

Cyber Warfare is any virtual conflict or digital attack by a country or individual(s) to disrupt and attack the enemy’s computer, servers and information systems. In these types of attacks, a country or individual(s) attempt to disrupt the IT system of organization or nation-states, especially for military, rigging elections and cyber-espionage.

Types of Cyber Attacks

1.Phishing

Many a time you get a mail which states: Hey you have won $10000, please log in on our website and claim your prize money. The mail is actually from an attacker who would use the dummy site to get yours's Debit/Credit card info.

2.Malware

This is a malicious software which is designed to harm your computer, server, IT network and other vital installations. It has different names such as trojan, worm and virus. These types of software usually lead the hacker to get access in your system.

3.Man in the middle attack (MITM)

As the name states, a malicious actor will try to gain information that is going through two or more systems. The hacker will try to intercept the data. For example, you are using your credit card to buy something online and will fill your all info, if a hacker(s) can interpret the data then it can be easily accessed by them.

4.Cryptojacking

It is a malicious use of a person(s) computing power to mine the cryptocurrencies without consent. It targets the processing power and uses it to mine cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

5.Ransomware

It is a form of malicious software that overtakes the computer that threatens you and deny you access to the computer. The attacker demands a ransom from the person, promising to restore the data and allow access to the system.

Recent Cyberattacks

1.Petya

It is regarded as the worst cyber-attack in the history of cyber warfare and the malware spread like wildfire across the world.

Once it attacks a system this message is displayed:

"The computer has been infected by Petya and that all data would be permanently lost unless a Bitcoin payment is done "



After a few months a new version of Petya spread called Notpetya, it is mostly similar to the previous malware, but the difference is it can easily spread, and can is encrypt everything. Mostly Microsoft systems were affected by this malware.

2.WannaCry

It is a ransomware that spread very quickly in 2017 and affected many systems across the globe. Ransom. WannaCry is a malicious software that delivers a ransomware to the device. It has two main components. A worm module used for self-propagation and a ransom module used for handling the ransom extortion activities.

WannaCry works by encrypting the data in a system and informs the user that their data has been locked. It displays information on a screen that how much you pay to unlock the data and it takes payment through bitcoin.

3.Yahoo

In 2014 1 billion accounts were hacked and in 2017 it was even bigger where at least 3 billion accounts were compromised, and the data was leaked on the internet. Till now it is regarded as the biggest data breach of all time.

Recently Yahoo has pledged $117 million towards compensating the victims whose data and personal information were leaked.

4.Github

Github was the victim of the largest known DDoS attack in history. DDoS — or distributed denial of service - is a cyber-attack that aims to bring websites and servers down by bombarding them with so much traffic that their services and IT infrastructure are unable to handle it all. It is mainly done to bring the websites down (offline).

What is cyber security?

Cybersecurity refers to the technologies, software and practices to protect servers, networks, programs and devices from any attack and unauthorized access.

In today's world, anything which is online is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Cybersecurity is important because large organizations, government, military, social media websites and banks store a large amount of data and sensitive information online, so it is necessary to build a system which is safe, secure and impenetrable.

The future of Cyber Security

1. Artificial Intelligence

To put a counter attack on the hackers and malicious software, we need to build a system which can easily detect any malware/virus in the system before it can harm the devices. AI technologies may solve this matter by bringing automation and autonomous decisions which can predict the behavior of a program and will bring next level capability to neutralize these malicious objects.

2.Cyber Insurance

According to a report, cybercrime damages will be $6 trillion! by 2021. Cybercrimes are likely to occur in future and can cause huge losses for organizations. So, these organizations want to transfer this risk and here cyber insurance role comes into play.

In simple words, a cyber insurance policy or cyber risk insurance is designed to help an organization reduce risk exposure by equalizing costs involved with full or partial recovery after a cyber-related security breach or any similar event.

3.Cloud Technology

Nowadays every business and organizations are using cloud service for secure and safe data storage. The cloud is just a server to store data, software and information so it can be easily accessed by anyone.

There are a multifactorial authentication and secure navigation system in cloud which build a strong firewall and can’t be easily accessed by any malicious object. Data encryption is also incorporated so no one can easily access the into the system.

4.Machine Learning

Machine learning can easily collect, manage, analyze and process data. In this way, it can analyze any unpredictable cyber-attack and develop response system. So specific algorithms can be developed and designed which will predict and stop future attacks without any human intervention.

Deep learning algorithms can find out unknown ransomware or any harmful software if data sets can be instructed to analyze the behaviour of the malicious software. The task of the algorithm is to find the main features for each file in the data. When a ransom file or software attacks a system, that file or software can be checked against the trained model and required security actions can be incorporated before it encrypts the whole data of the system or locks access to the device.

5.Blockchain

Blockchain is distributed, a decentralized and digitized network which can have millions of users and each data is secured by cryptography. Block Chain technology became popular after the rise of Bitcoin as it uses the same technology. Block Chain technology is designed in such a way that there is no centralized system.

Blockchain technology provides us with the best tools to protect the data from malicious sources. In order to destroy or damage a blockchain, a person needs to destroy the data stored on every user’s computer/systems in the global network. This could be millions of computers and devices, so it is almost impossible to break into the system.

So in overall, we will see systems that are smarter, sophisticated and impenetrable which can handle large amounts of data, systems that can train themselves quickly, that can implement decisions in real time and that connect to shared-intelligence networks that will keep all the information safe.