20 years has brought us to the catch-22 scenario. On one hand, the modern economy is in an urgent need of connectivity. Web connectivity, information exchange, etc. On the other hand, as we get more and more connected, we get more and more vulnerable, and we expose ourselves to attacks which we in common language refers to cyber attacks.
I would like to share with you some of my almost 30 years of cybersecurity experience. Since mankind started wars conflict well always about resources, living resources, whether those were land and food in the advocate agriculture age or later on and the center of manufacturing in the Industrial Age. The second world war was won by the part that could manufacture more platforms whether those were aircrafts ships or tanks with, then the other side, and the weapon if you’d like that made this equilibrium break was the long strikes whether those were airborne or those were by misses the first missiles. When they are met when the United States was out of the reach of this weapon then they could produce all these war machines that enabled the allies to win the war. As our in us as individuals, organizations, nations, and NGOs depend more on connectivity, on the information, on the digital technologies. In this new era, the new battlegrounds of geopolitics as transferred into this domain, and if we will be able to find a way to have an impact on the other side whether this will be by influence, by maintaining some old on his infrastructure, has ransom work of creating a any other type of effect, then we can create a leverage to win our goal, and cyber. For me I think it’s for more most researchers is the combination of three different parts it’s the infrastructure, is the digital information itself, but it’s also the bilateral engagement that those sister and knowledge have with human behavior. We affect those technologies but we are also being affected by those technologies.
If we take the past five or six years looking from the bird’s view,w we understand that those campaigns that were revealed by nation-states or by commercial players such as Zonealarm, or by other bad players within the dark web have brought us to an age where you can reach off the shelf and build a cyber weapon with very little resources and very little information how to build this weapon. Just go to the dark web, find the right form, find the right place, sometimes you’ll find on YouTube that still the Stuxnet event or incident you can go to the YouTube and find YouTube pieces that explain how to take Stuxnet apart and tickle with it step by step. I hope that nobody will try and do that today. The bad news, on the defense part, as you are trying to get more digital opportunities, you need to take care and deal with simultaneously with diverse actors those can be let’s take the Sony, this is a nation-state player that was doing something against a commercial company and then some if I was the CEO of Sony I would have looked to my government says “what’s now?” this is not cybercrime, and on the other end you have cyber actors reaching and basically achieving those proliferated cyber weapons with the potential to get very dangerous or pose an imminent threat to your organization, your process, but also to your lives as an individual, and you have to deal both with these and with these on the same time.
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with with the term crisis have you heard about crisis so Crisis is a new malware that was discovered nation-state weapon, it was discovered on the last December 2017 and Crisis does a very simple effect.
100 years ago, I could have reached through papers, then the radio, then the television, so my impact was on who I was connected to. Today using social networks, everybody is connected, everybody can be influenced and we’ve seen the example about just fake news, so fake news has become not a nuisance. They’ve become the new tool of geopolitics. Along with cyber assault weapon capabilities, you get a very dangerous period.