Louis Columbus
As far back as 2009, hackers were able to access drone feeds from highly specialized drones that were covering the war in Iraq.
The use of proprietary wireless signals and protocols within IoT devices is the main avenue of compromise for hackers and threat actors.
Fake digital fingerprints can be created by AI engines that are capable of fooling fingerprint scanners on smartphones and other devices that use this form of authentication.
Hackers tricked an executive assistant at a UK-based firm into transferring more than $200,000 to a bogus account because they "heard their CEO tell them to" on the phone where the hackers used deep fake technology.
These and many other fascinating insights are from Dr. Chase Cunningham's latest book Cyber Warfare – Truth, Tactics, and Strategies: Strategic concepts and truths to help you and your organization survive on the battleground of cyber warfare available on Amazon. Chase's book reads more like a spy thriller with the technical accuracy and depth of a certification guide than any other cybersecurity book I've read in years.
The narrative on how drones have increasingly become weaponized and orchestrated into swarms provides a glimpse into the intersection of cyber and kinetic warfare techniques and their future. Chapter 5's discussion of deep fake technologies alludes to the ethics of AI being used for facial recognition and how the technology's power can quickly make a bad situation worse. As Dr. Cunningham remarks at the close of Chapter 5," AI can beat AI, but the crux of the response remains on humans."
The following are key insights from the book:
Provides a consistent, pragmatic definition of just what a cyber-attack is. Being an industry analyst, Dr. Cunningham no doubt gets into many debates with practitioners and cybersecurity vendors of just what a cyber-attack is. His straightforward definition in the book, "a cyber-attack is defined in most circles familiar with the topic area as an unauthorized intrusion into a computer or a computer network in such forms as tampering, denial of service, data theft, and server infiltration" (pg. 4) covers all areas and is technology-agnostic enough to apply to all vendors in the industry.
Think a VPN Connection Is Secure? Think Again. Chapter 2 begins with an all-too-common scenario of how cybercriminals can easily hack a corporate network accessed remotely via VPN. All that is needed for a malicious actor to begin the exploitation of a VPN connection is a simple port scan against the target infrastructure (pg. 38). Dr. Cunningham provides prescriptive guidance down to the port level of how to secure VPNs. And it's not just individual users or organizations' VPNs being attacked. "VPN providers can be targeted as well, such as the exploits against Avast and NordVPN in 2019. In those attacks, the malicious actor was able to leverage temporary credentials, thanks to a vulnerability in systems within a temporary data center provider's remote management tool," (pg. 39) Dr. Cunningham writes.
Killing passwords will make the cyber world a safer place, and Dr. Cunningham is on a mission to do that. One of the most powerful messages of this book is how passwords are the single point of greatest weakness, in any persons' or organization's security. "The password: the single most prolific means of authentication for enterprises, users, and almost any system on the planet is the lynchpin of failed security in cyberspace" (pg. 41), he writes. Chapter 7's section Why Kill The Password? Further strengthens the argument for doing away with password as soon as possible for more reliable series of authentication technologies.
Realize that every person's device and the identity it represents are the real security perimeter of any organization. Throughout the book there are many examples of how Zero Trust Security is the future of enterprise cybersecurity. Chase mentions NIST Zero Trust standard 800:207 and provides his take on how this standard can be interpreted and acted on for improving enterprise security strategies. He also says that the US DoD Armed Forces use MobileIron to defend user's devices globally and their providing the industry's first mobile-centric security platform that makes the mobile device the ID that is used by the user to access the infrastructure. Chase writes, "because the mobile device is the ID, it is possible to fully eliminate passwords and enable a secure user authentication from user devices without requiring the user to remember or even type in passwords" (pg. 241). He analyzes how MobileIron applies a standards-based zero sign-on using FIDO2 to Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD). Chase also points out that one of the leading design goals of FIDO2 is to enable users to leverage common devices to easily authenticate to online services in both mobile and desktop environments.
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