Cyber Warfare

photo courtesy of pablo amargo/boston globe

"Cyber warfare represents the next frontier for organized crime, state-sponsored espionage, hacktivists, and anarchists", according to Microsoft's Principal Researcher and Partner, Dr. Chris White. This was his assertation at the 2018 Global Business Forum held in Banff on September 27th.

And like many other cyber related crimes, he states that too many companies remain blissfully ignorant of the risks, only finding out after an attack has been successful and their proprietary technology, financial information or customer data has been exposed.

Five years ago there were only about 5 countries that had the capability to conduct cyber warfare, but that number has grown to over 60 countries, states Roy Boisvert of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He believes that "our infrastructure could be a target" yet thinks that "firms responsible for these systems are lacking in effort to defend against such attacks". 

If you think about it, hackers could cripple a country if they gained access to things like the power grid, water service, and other such critical infrastructure. I'm actually amazed that this hasn't already happened to some degree. or maybe it has and we just don't know about it, since the government tends to keep these things under wraps in an effort to catch the criminals. 

The Canadian federal government is concerned about cyberattacks perpetrated by state-sponsored agents targeting critical infrastructure and is quietly and steadily working on improving defenses in this area.