Cybersecurity?

Digital data

In the last few decades, dramatic changes have occurred in the technologies that exist, as well as who use such technologies, how they do so, and for what purposes. All of these factors impact cybersecurity.

Consider, for example, that when many of the people alive today were children, controlling access to data in a business environment simply meant that the data owner placed a physical file containing the information into a locked cabinet and gave the key to only people the owner recognized as being authorized personnel and only when they requested the key during business hours. For additional security, the data owner may have located the cabinet in an office that was locked after business hours and which itself was in a building that was also locked and alarmed.

Today, with the digital storage of information, however, simple filing and protection schemes have been replaced with complex technologies that must automatically authenticate users who seek the data from potentially any location at potentially any time, determine whether the users are authorized to access a particular element or set of data, and securely deliver the proper data — all while preventing any attacks against the system servicing data requests, any attacks against the data in transit, and any of the security controls protecting the both of them.

Furthermore, the transition from written communication to email and chat has moved tremendous amounts of sensitive information to Internet-connected servers. Likewise, society’s move from film to digital photography and videography has increased the stakes for cybersecurity. Nearly every photograph and video taken today is stored electronically rather than on film and negatives — a situation that has enabled criminals situated anywhere to either steal people’s images and leak them, hold people’s valuable images ransom with ransomware, or use them to create turmoil in people’s personal lives by creating fake profiles on dating sites, for example. The fact that movies and television shows are now stored and transmitted electronically has likewise allowed pirates to copy them and offer them to the masses — sometimes via malware-infested websites.

The Internet

The most significant technological advancement when it comes to cybersecurity impact has been the arrival of the Internet era, and, more specifically, the transformation of the Internet from a small network connecting researchers at a few universities to an enormous worldwide communication system utilized by a tremendous number of people, businesses, and organizations. In recent years, the Internet has also become the conduit for communication both by billions of smart devices and by people remotely connecting to industrial control systems. Just a few decades ago, it was unfathomable that hackers from across the globe could disrupt a business, manipulate an election, create a fuel shortage, pollute drinking water, or steal a billion dollars. Today, no knowledgeable person would dismiss any such possibilities.

Prior to the Internet era, it was extremely difficult for the average hacker to financially profit by hacking. The arrival of online banking and commerce in the 1990s, however, meant that hackers could directly steal money or goods and services — which meant that not only could hackers quickly and easily monetize their efforts, but unethical people had strong incentives to enter the world of cybercrime.

Cryptocurrency

Compounding those incentives severalfold has been the arrival and proliferation of cryptocurrency over the past decade, along with innovation that has dramatically magnified the potential return-on-investment for criminals involved in cybercrime, simultaneously increasing their ability to earn money through cybercrime and improving their ability to hide while doing so. Criminals historically faced a challenge when receiving payments since the account from which they ultimately withdrew the money could often be tied to them. Cryptocurrency effectively eliminated such risks.

In addition, not only has the dramatic rise in the value of cryptocurrencies held by criminals over the past few years enriched many crooks, providing evildoers with the resources to invest in enhancing their cyber-arsenals, but also the public’s perception of cryptocurrency as a quick way to get rich has helped scammers perpetuate all sorts of social engineering–based cybercrimes related to cryptocurrency investing.

Furthermore, the availability and global liquidity of cryptocurrency has helped criminals launder money obtained through the perpetration of all sorts of crimes.

Mobile workforces and ubiquitous access

Not that many years ago, in the pre-Internet era, it was impossible for hackers to access corporate systems remotely because corporate networks were not connected to any public networks, and often had no dial-in capabilities. Executives on the road would often call their assistants to check messages and obtain necessary data while they were remote. In later years they may have connected to corporate networks via special dial-up connections using telephone-line–based private lines for extremely limited access to only one or two specific systems.

Connectivity to the Internet, of course, created risk, but initially most firewalls were set up in ways that did not allow people outside the organization to initiate communications — so, short of firewall misconfigurations and/or bugs, most internal systems remained relatively isolated. The dawn of e-commerce and e-banking, of course, meant that certain production systems had to be reachable and addressable from the outside world, but employee networks, for example, usually remained generally isolated.

The arrival of remote access technologies — starting with services like Outlook Web Access and pcAnywhere, and evolving to full VPN and VPN-like access — has totally changed the game.

The dramatic reduction in the cost of cellular-based high-speed Internet access and the availability of mobile data plans supporting data limits sufficient enough to allow effective full-time use have dramatically reduced the need for utilizing public Wi-Fi connections. Risks that one might have deemed reasonable to take a few years ago in order to achieve various business aims have become unnecessary, and as such, policies and procedures regarding public Wi-Fi access must be updated.

Big data

While big data is helping facilitate the creation of many cybersecurity technologies, it also creates opportunities for attackers. By correlating large amounts of information about the people working for an organization, for example, criminals can more easily than before identify ideal methods for social engineering their way into the organization or locate and exploit possible vulnerabilities in the organization’s infrastructure. As a result, various organizations have been effectively forced to implement all sorts of controls to prevent the leaking of information, and the practices of many organizations have invited all sorts of accusations around data misuse and inappropriate protections from both employees and outsiders.

The COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a watershed moment in the history of cybersecurity. By forcing people to stay home in environments that are unprecedentedly isolated from one another, the novel coronavirus dramatically — and likely permanently — changed the way people in the Western world work, thereby yielding multiple, significant impacts on cybersecurity.

In the short term, the pandemic created all sorts of cybersecurity problems. Organizations that had no work-from-home infrastructures in place, or had such infrastructure but only for a limited portion of their employee populations, were suddenly faced with having to enable people to work from home — often without the ability to prepare users, policies, procedures, and technologies in advance. Many such businesses could not distribute laptops or security devices fast enough to prevent work stoppages, and as a result, relied on users to utilize their personal devices for work purposes without any additional security layers added.

Likewise, few organizations offered their employees separate Internet connections or separate routers for their remote workstations, so remote workers were nearly always sharing physical and logical networks with their other personal devices and possibly with their children who may have been gaming and/or attending virtual school. The security risks of doing such is discussed in detail in Book 2, Chapter 3.

Compounding COVID-19–inflicted cybersecurity problems was the fact that while many employers did provide some forms of endpoint security software, many did not, and even those that did rarely addressed any hardware-based risks. To this day, for example, many employers have no idea what router models their employees are using for remote access or when such devices were last updated.

Another major cybersecurity concern created by the pandemic has been that communications between employees shifted from conference rooms to remote meetings, opening the doors for hackers to disrupt communications or steal confidential information. The problems were so bad that a new term “zoom bombing” was coined in 2020 to refer to the practice of mischievous folks joining and wreaking havoc in virtual meetings to which they were never invited.

Of course, the fact that people who would otherwise work together in the same location are suddenly unable to communicate quickly in person has also opened the door for many social engineering attacks. For example, a CFO who receives an email from the boss asking that the company pay a certain party for services cannot verify the validity of the request as the CFO has done many times in the past by walking ten feet to the boss’s office to confirm that the boss actually sent the message.

Likewise, people working in homes in which children are in virtual school, or quarantined, or simply living, often suffer from far more interruptions than they would had they been working in an office setting. Interruptions often lead to mistakes, and mistakes often lead to cybersecurity problems. The stress of remaining socially isolated for long periods of time also increases the odds of people making dangerous cybersecurity errors.

At a macro level, the sudden shift to work-at-home arrangements has meant that many cybersecurity professionals are increasingly overwhelmed, a problem further exacerbated by organizations having to reallocate resources — sometimes shifting both people and money from security projects to efforts to ensure continuity of operations.

And, of course, being confined to their homes has afforded many hackers more time to work on their crafts as well, perhaps contributing to the significant rise in the number of zero-day attacks and other newer forms of cybersecurity attacks seen since the pandemic’s onset. Book 1, Chapter 2 dives into many of the common cyberattacks that are out there.

Entire books have been written on the impact of technological advancement. The main point to understand is that technological advancement has had a significant impact on cybersecurity, making security harder to deliver and raising the stakes when parties fail to properly protect their assets. In addition, unforeseen developments, such as pandemics, can bring sudden, huge technological changes that carry with them tremendous cybersecurity dangers.

Data collection

The proliferation of information online and the ability to attack machines all over the world have meant that governments can spy on citizens of their own countries and on the residents of other nations to an extent never before possible.

Furthermore, as more and more business, personal, and societal activities leave behind digital footprints, governments have much easier access to a much greater amount of information about their potential intelligence targets than they could acquire even at dramatically higher costs just a few years ago. Coupled with the relatively low cost of digital storage, advancing big data technologies, and the expected eventual impotence of many of today’s encryption technologies due to the emergence of quantum computing and other cutting-edge developments, governments have a strong incentive to collect and store as much information as they can about as many people as they can, in case it is of use at some later date. It is more likely than not, for example, that hostile governments may have already begun compiling dossiers on the people who will eventually serve as president and vice president of the United States 25 years from now.

The long-term consequences of this phenomenon are, obviously, as of yet unknown, but one thing is clear: If businesses do not properly protect data, less-than-friendly nations are likely to obtain it and store it for use in either the short term, the long term, or both.

Election interference

A generation ago, for one nation to interfere in the elections of another was no trivial matter. Of course, such interference existed — it has occurred as long as there have been elections — but carrying out significant interference campaigns was expensive, resource-intensive, and extremely risky.

To spread misinformation and other propaganda, materials had to be printed and physically distributed or recorded and transmitted via radio, meaning that individual campaigns were likely to reach only small audiences. As such, the efficacy effects of such efforts were often quite low, and the risk of the party running the campaign being exposed was relatively high, and often carried with it the potential for severe repercussions.

Manipulating voter registration databases to prevent legitimate voters from voting and/or to allow bogus voters to vote was extremely difficult and entailed tremendous risks; someone “working on the inside” would likely have had to be nothing short of a traitor in order to have any real significant on election results. In a country such as the United States, in which voter registration databases are decentralized and managed on a county level, recruiting sufficient saboteurs to truly impact a major election would likely have been impossible, and the odds of getting caught while attempting to do so were likely extremely high.

Likewise, in the era of paper ballots cast in person and of manual vote counting, for a foreign power to manipulate actual vote counts on any large scale was impractical, if not impossible.

Today, however, the game has changed. A government can easily spread misinformation through social media at an extremely low cost. If it crafts a well-thought-out campaign, it can rely on other people to spread the misinformation — something that people could not do en masse in the era of radio recordings and printed pamphlets. The ability to reach many more people, at a much lower cost than ever before, has meant that more parties are able to interfere in political campaigns and can do so with more efficacy than in the past. Similarly, governments can spread misinformation to stir up civil discontent within their adversaries’ nations and to spread hostility between ethnic and religious groups living in foreign lands.

Insecure mail-in ballots as used throughout the United States during the 2020 presidential election aggravated mistrust. And, with voter registration databases stored electronically and sometimes on servers that are at least indirectly connected to the Internet, records may be able to be added, modified, or deleted from halfway across the globe without detection. Even if such hacking is, in reality, impossible, the fact that many citizens today believe that it may be possible has led to an undermining of faith in elections, a phenomenon that we have witnessed in recent years and that has permeated throughout all levels of society. Even Jimmy Carter, a former president of the United States, expressed at one point that that he believed that full investigation into the 2016 presidential election would show that Donald Trump lost the election — despite there being absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support such a conclusion, even after a thorough FBI investigation into the matter. Statements and actions from the other side of the political aisle — including the terrible chaos at the U.S. Capitol after the 2020 presidential election — showed clearly that concerns about election integrity, and the perception that elections might be manipulatable through cyberattacks and other technology-based techniques, are bipartisan. It is also not hard to imagine that if online voting were ever to arrive, the potential for vote manipulation by foreign governments, criminals, and even political parties within the nation voting — and for removing the ballot auditability that exists today — would grow astronomically.

In an indication of how much concern is growing around potential election manipulation, consider that a decade ago, the United States did not consider election-related computer systems to be critical infrastructure, and did not directly provide federal funding to secure such systems. Today, most people understand that the need for cybersecurity in such areas is of paramount importance, and the policies and behavior of just a few years ago seems nothing short of crazy.

Hacktivism

Likewise, the spread of democracy since the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago, coupled with Internet-based interaction between people all over the globe, has ushered in the era of hacktivism. People are aware of the goings-on in more places than in the past. Hackers angry about some government policy or activity in some location may target that government or the citizens of the country over which it rules from places far away. Likewise, citizens of one country may target entities in another country with whose policies they disagree, or whose government they consider a national adversary.

Greater freedom

At the same time, repressed people are now more aware of the lifestyles of people in freer and more prosperous countries, a phenomenon that has both forced some governments to liberalize, and motivated others to implement cybersecurity-type controls to prevent using various Internet-based services.

Sanctions

Another political ramification of cybersecurity pertains to international sanctions: Rogue states subject to such sanctions have been able to use cybercrime of various forms to circumvent such sanctions.

For example, North Korea is believed to have spread malware that mines cryptocurrency for the totalitarian state to computers all over the world, thereby allowing the country to circumvent sanctions by obtaining liquid money that can easily be spent anywhere.

Thus, the failure by individuals to adequately secure their personal computers can directly impact political negotiations.