Former LulzSec hacker Hector "Sabu" Monsegur and cybersecurity expert Mikko Hypponen on the rise of the cyber arms race.

From allegations of Russian hacking of emails in the US, to the Stuxnet attack on Iran, countries are increasingly taking fights off the battlefield and into cyberspace.

Is there a cyber arms race brewing, and how worried should we be about cyber attacks?

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of cybersecurity company F-Secure, says we could be facing a decades-long cyber arms race that is just now in its infancy.

"It seems we are now jumping to the next arms race, which will be the cyber arms race," says Hypponen. "This next arms race is in the very beginning right now; it might go on for decades, for the next 60 years."

Hector Monsegur, the former LulzSec hacker who went by the name of Sabu, says key infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to cyberwarfare.

"From my personal experience, I got to see and I got to even connect to - in my previous life [as a hacker] - industrial systems," says Monsegur, who is now the director of Rhino Security Labs. "In some cases - or most cases - a lot of these systems are installed with default passwords straight from the manual, and usually it's just four zeroes.

"There's always a human element, a weakness to every infrastructure, and it's always the human."

In this week's Arena, cybersecurity expert Mikko Hypponen and former blackhat hacker Hector Monsegur discuss the perils of cyber war.

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Source: Al Jazeera News