The world has woken up to the announcement of a $350 billion deal between the United States of America and Saudi Arabia that will be part of a 10-year agreement and long term cooperative relationship between the two countries.
Indeed the deal includes conventional weapons such as tanks, helicopters and ships along with intelligence gathering aircraft and missile defense radars but it also interestingly and very strategically introduces cybersecurity tools and perhaps cyber weapons to this growing world market.
We also see rising demands for cyber weapons from countries such as India and according to “Transparency Market Research” (TMR), the global cyber weapon market was valued at $390 billion in 2014 but expected to go up to $600 billion by the end of 2021.
While vital intelligence and cybersecurity ventures projects $1 trillion will be spent globally on cybersecurity between 2017 and 2021, the world is likely to see these figures escalate possibly even two-fold if the private sector takes heed and realizes that hacking techniques like the recent “Wannacry” ransomware attack that saw the world media create panic and unprecedented chaos with a simple to fix solution.
As in the real world the cyber space must have certain security elements put in place so as to maintain some form of rational that creates a platform and scope for law and order for the stealth cyber thieves, cyber-terrorists and indeed espionage community.
Cybersecurity certainly can assist in protecting against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data or the measures taken to achieve this but certainly nothing is completely impenetrable.
Physical security provides the hard protection against events that could cause serious loss or damage to their enterprise, agency or institution.
Cyber intelligence will be the predicative method to protect critical and strategic infrastructure and intellectual property by the proactive collection of intelligence while researching and analyzing trends and technical developments and indeed is the most important of all aspects of real security doctrine.
As the world begins to spend more and more on cyber security, not enough attention is being paid to increasing the mass flow of information that stalks our lives through metadata and the hidden worms that crawl through our very eyes and are controlled by our own damaging fingertips.
In collecting virtual intelligence that is real time, predicative and available via open source intelligence (OSINT) means, there are methods of virtually collecting intelligence and analyzing the vital intelligence collected, providing law enforcement the ability to proactively gather time sensitive information and intelligence, creating a proactive preventative methodology instead of always being on the defense.
The cyber attacks are no doubt going to rise in quantity and quality and the cyber war is amongst us already; coercing and manipulating not only the unsuspecting easy targets but indeed the most advanced of cyber experts to simply click a button and become entrapped and held hostage to ransoms that have no borders or trace.
The questions that corporates and government should be asking themselves are not how many layers of security is needed but rather how to collect, correlate and transform the mass of information and disinformation that is being spread into actionable intelligence; that can be generated into a self- defense mode of counter attack before the damage is done.
Today it is not a specific country that is a key market for cyber weapons, but the world in its entirety. Major nations are boosting the cyber weapons sales globally and the smaller nations are not very far behind. The increasing investment by China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and others in the development of advanced cyber warfare methods and techniques will significantly aid the market’s expansion just as it has in the global conventional weapons market.
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