Rising cyber-attacks drive vendors to produce solutions like cyber grade military tools
Today’s state-sponsored cyber threat agents are using government-level cyber weapons to steal information of their adversaries. To preserve against the evolving cyber threats, the nations are relying on off-the-shelf, consumer-grade solutions. Enterprises and firms need military-grade protection tools that are just as thoroughly verified and authorized as the armed forces try their weapons.
As per the rising need, commercial vendors are starting to produce and sell nation-state-level cyber arms of their own. For instance, an analysis of Israeli’s notorious spyware firm NSO Group’s zero-click attack ‘ForcedEntry’ by ‘Google’s Project Zero’ unveiled how a determined commercial association could find uncertain but affecting vulnerabilities and build highly advanced exploits to serve their client’s cyber-attack goals so that when cybercriminals attack with their cyber weapons, commercial firms should have enough cyber arms with similar sophisticated technologies.
There are several instances of criminal organizations using government-level attack arms to threaten start-ups and businesses daily. According to the release by Shadow Brokers, Eternal Blue exploit(developed by The National Security) of Windows Server Message Block Protocol has been used in several high-profile cyber-attacks that include WannaCry, NotPetya, and, Even Cobalt Strike, originated as a penetration testing tool which is also has been pirated and extensively adopted to operate malware attacks.
In the year 2017, the WannaCry ransomware Cyber attack began to spread like a fire through system networks around the globe, encrypting over 200,000 devices among 150 Nations. This ransomware was considered ‘Wormable’ which means the malware could self-propagate without any human interaction.
In December 2017, the United States officially attributed this massive WannaCry ransomware cyberattack to North Korea. Several parties contributed to the research of finding the malware. The UK, Facebook, and Microsoft’s tracking of the attack confirms North Korea was behind the Ransomware attack.
After exposing North Korea to the WannaCry attack, The UK officially pointed out Russia for the NotPetya malware attack. The UK government identified that the Russian military was responsible for the destructive NotPetya cyber-attack of June 2017 against Ukrainian sovereignty. It was analyzed by security researchers that this malware attack was designed to wipe the systems.
The NotPetya malware initially infected organizations via a compromised update from Ukraine accounting software provider MEDoc. This software is widely used by Ukraine agencies as this is the requirement for companies to accomplish the tasks. The company reported losses of $300M due to this campaign.
To prevent from past incidents of ransomware attacks, vendors produce solutions in the form of tools that can fulfill the delicate needs of government while being user-friendly.
Out of several, one such product is the cyber range, which has been used by numerous government entities and military applications in the U.S. and allied nations that including Nation’s Cyber Command, the departments of Homeland Security and Energy, etc to embrace joint training for teams to exercise responses, advance exposure techniques and deploy counter-hacking techniques.
The product not only deploys real malware and cyber-attacks without compromising the production system but also helps to evaluate public and private sector-wide communications, information sharing mechanisms, crisis management protocols, decision-making, and legal & regulatory considerations.
The last two years taught us that cyber criminals utilize military-grade cyber resources against organizations and entities. This is the time for entities for reverting back to the attackers by forming such cyber-grade military tools and technologies to defend and secure their business with confidence.
