Monday, August 28, 2006

Emerging Shifts in Cyberwar Tactics

Via FCW.com -

Cyberwar is changing, and network defense must adapt, two leading executives told a military audience at the Air Force Information Technology Conference at Auburn University’s Montgomery campus earlier this month.

“We are at a much more dangerous place today than we were four or five years ago,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer. The perpetrators of cyberattacks have shifted in recent years from amateur hackers seeking notoriety to organized criminal enterprises with financial or hostile goals, he said.

John Thompson, Symantec’s CEO, said today’s cybercriminal is interested in “perpetrating silent, highly targeted attacks to steal sensitive personal, financial and operational information.” That new criminal tactic marks a shift away from large-scale virus or worm attacks. The number of such attacks dropped from about 100 between 2002 and 2004 to only six last year, he said.

Responses to cyberattacks are evolving, too, Ballmer said. In the past, experts worked to close vulnerabilities in programs and shorten release times for upgrades and patches. Now they focus on building systems that intruders cannot penetrate, he said.

That new defense strategy requires abandoning the suit-of-armor approach, in which developers added layers of protection to keep information safe.

Those layers restricted data access, hampering real-time use and mission performance, Thompson said. Effective cyberdefense will depend on a combination of protecting the IT infrastructure, information and interactions among people using the information, he added.

Standardized data formats and a common software infrastructure are crucial to IT infrastructure protection, Thompson said. Organizations must be sure to transfer data to backup systems to be ready for natural or man-made disasters. “After all, servers and laptop [computers] can be replaced. The information on them most likely cannot,” he said.

Disgruntled or careless employees can do significant damage, so organizations must monitor transactions to instantly combat suspicious or dangerous activity, Thompson said. For example, comply-and-connect mechanisms can verify user identity, he said. The proliferation of wireless devices and telework requires increasingly sophisticated approaches to certification and authentication, he added.

The next cyberwar battle will be fought over unstructured data, including e-mail messages, instant messages, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word documents, and voice-over-IP conversations, which compose 80 percent to 90 percent of data accessible via the Internet, Thompson said.




While I agree with Josh's conclusion that the tactics of cyberwar are changing, I do not agree that corporations or people should abandon the "defense in depth" idea. Perhaps I am reading too much into this sentence - "That new defense strategy requires abandoning the suit-of-armor approach, in which developers added layers of protection to keep information safe."

Corporations must remember that the cyberwar is not a "single-front" war. It has to be defended on multiple fronts at the same time. Investing in new cutting-edge hardware isn't enough, you must invest in your corporate "software" (aka your employees).

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