Cyber Warfare involves breaching of digital security leading to a massive disruption or breakdown of services vital for the smooth functioning of a country. With motives to hit a country's economy, other country's government officials often secretly supports such catastrophic incidents which renders to a potential data leakage or disruption in common pursuits.

Histories of such cyber warfare attacks had been for decades, ruled over through incognito streaming of an espionage. Zero involvement of violence and in most cases no loss of lives, such strategic attacks lead to chaos within the borders. Almost every governed tasks in managing real world infrastuctures are connected to computer systems which opens for a potential vulnerability to exploits. Shuting down a connected computer system may disrupt such activities wherein the banks encounter frozen accounts, disabled power stations, unaccounted amount of values shown in accounts, airport inactivity, defense security breach and many others that counters with such a catastrophy.

The more involvement of technology in advancing systems and security of a country leading to a modified economic stimulus, such potential security or data breach paves in. As the report by Mordor Intelligence marks the market value of such cyber warfare,

The Cyber Warfare Market was valued at USD 33.01 billion in 2019, and it is expected to reach USD 102.63 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 21.16%, during the forecast period (2020 - 2025).

Valuable and sensitive information segmenting a portion of economy, stored digitally, provides instances for an effective cyber attack. Cyber attacks are categorised under defined scenarios of wasting digital security to an unprecedented disruption.

5 Most Important Types of Cyber Attacks

Malware

A software, responsible for major breaches in a computer system by providing unwanted access to third party organizations or individuals is commonly named as a Malware. Malwares include variants as Spyware, Ransomware, Viruses, Worms and Trojans.

Malwares are specially designed to cause havoc in a cyber network inducing immense damage to data or create an unauthorized access point. The first of its kind goes long back in 1970s when the "Creeper Worm" was created as a experimental self-replicating program by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies. Possibilities of a malware ranges from data leakage and transfer to let the Operating System inoperational.

Ransomware are such a kind that demands ransom amount for unblocking a network. Such a kind, cloaks itself within a software waiting to be installed in a computer system through deceptive email or website links, making the system vulnerable as it thereafter denies access to the computer system or the network unless a ransom is paid.

At the latest release of a guide by Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, awareness for the security to be maintained and followed has been detailed so that systems are not impacted with the adverses of a Ransomware. WannaCry took over the Internet in rush as a ransomware cryptoworm, which as per the report,

Given the timeline, and calculating accrual of the value on the bitcoin originally paid into the wallets at $93,531, Cisco threat researchers estimate that roughly 312 ransom payments were made.

Phishing

Phishing is a common threat which covers most of the fraudulent activities till date, made my hackers or fraudsters. It is a technique mostly used through communications wherein the credentials are either asked for or emails are sent including such fake sites which are made just to collect and store information for later use. Sensitive data as in Credit Card credentials, PAN No., Debit Card credentials, other Net Banking details which are often asked to provide, later used to take out significant amounts of money from the victim's account.

Phishing can be controlled with increased awareness on managing online accounts and never following any links provided. Google has updated their policies to detect phishing websites which warns the users from the potential threat from a website. However, such are hard to avoid in case the user is casual with these steps to be followed so that they do not be a part of the victims.

Eavesdropping Attacks

Photo by Alex Hu on Unsplash

Such an attack is a serious kind wherein the attackers snoops within a public network, with intentions to steal data. Mostly common in case of a public WiFi as it is an open network allowing such attackers to interupt in the traffic creating a two-party transaction, without revealing its existence.

Maintaining a strong password for a WiFi network avoids such security breaches. Concerns for such are elevating due to the increased adoption of Work From Home (WFH) facilities, which requires responsible security management to ensure that the sensitive information are not prone to any attacks within the network. As per the latest researches, eavesdropping attack can be successfully implemented through control of robotic vacuum cleaners or the voice assistants present at home. However, such would require the attacker to be present within the vicinity of the local network.

In case of robotic vacuum cleaners, it uses the LIDAR technology to monitor on the surroundings of a room. Attackers can remotely access such to sense these and decode the sound signals to extricate sensitive information discussed inside, at home.

In case of the voice assistant devices, an attacker having access to the network can listen to the conversations as using voice assistants are not only limited to just listening to musics or switching off other connected devices. Rather, voice assistants has more intimidated usage in controlling other devices by using sensitive credentials as individuals speaks out load, which may have a potential data leak.

Denial of Service (DoS) Attack

A Denial of Service attack is as the name suggest, meant to break the service of a website running in a network by disrupting the normal traffic of a targeted server. More sophisticated version of such goes with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack wherein the botnets are utilized to flood in requests resulting to bring down the server or network. Infected with malware are the systems that are used as bots creating a network known as botnets to legitimate a remotely controlled attack.

Mostly such attacks are targeted to businesses confering to financial loss due to an incomplete transaction in case of an ecommerce website. One of the most popular DDoS attack was in 2016 when the Dyn cyberattack happened into taking down more than 80 big websites Amazon, Reddit, CNN, Paypal, and numerous others.

Can't get on a website? This is a live map, right now, of the massive DDoS attacks on Dyn's servers. It is creating many issues right now. pic.twitter.com/fekUqNgaL7
— Flying With Fish (@flyingwithfish) October 21, 2016

As per the claims suggested by the New World Hackers as they organized botnets to attack with 1.2 Terrabits per second of data at the DYN Servers,

We didn't do this to attract federal agents, only test power.

SQL Injection

SQL Injection or Structured Query Language Injection allows the attacker to induce a query into the server which would force it to reveal some vulnerabilities to be exploited further. Turn around authentications of a webpage or an application conjuring into SQL database content reveal or modify contents of it to the attackers will.

Testing vulnerabilities to actual implementation of such attacks to take over database controls, SQL Injection has been responsible for countless breaches. Jeff Forristal is one among the first to document such injection attacks concerning for major improvements in the database security, as noted by him in an interview,

Certainly [SQL injection] is still there. From the perspective that it's still prolific, yeah it's an interesting problem, but core vulnerability classes are prolific in many places anyway.

CYBER WARFARE ATTACKS

Russian Hackers Breach Homeland Security

At the latest, Russian hackers are reportedly compromising U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As per the spokesperson from Department of Homeland Security,

The Department of Homeland Security is aware of cyber breaches across the federal government and working closely with our partners in the public and private sector on the federal response

Such breaches into the defense of a country, proves a major concern to the U.S. Government in the situation of an ongoing crisis of Coronavirus and other border disputes. The Russian Intelligence Hackers known to be as APT 29 has been previously involved in stealing Vaccine research, as per The Washington Post.

Foxconn Ransomware Attack

Foxconn, the parent company of Sharp Corp. and Belkin, had suffered from ransomware attack on November 29, 2020 with a demand of $34.7 million in Bitcoin, thereby leaking business data and reports to public. As per the note of the DoppelPaymer, the ransomware operator,

Your files, backups and shadow copies are unavailable until you pay for a decryption tool. If no contact [is] made in 3 business days after the infection, [the] first portion of data will be shared to [the] public ... and all the rest will remain unreachable to you.
Foxconn Ransomware Attack

Further in a statement to BleepingComputer, the DoppelPayment detailed on the attack as,

We encrypted NA segment, not whole foxconn, it's about 1200-1400 servers, and not focused on workstations. They also had about 75TB's of misc backups, what we were able to - we destroyed (approx 20-30TB).

FireEye Cyber Attack

One of world's leading cybersecurity organizations, FireEye has reported on an attack made by the Nation backed hacker group with the motive to collect sensitive information of some government officials. The company claims that there has not been any data breach noted in the system as the security tools were successful in cutting out such attack. As per a blog by the CEO Kevin Mandia,

... While the attacker was able to access some of our internal systems, at this point in our investigation, we have seen no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated data from our primary systems that store customer information from our incident response or consulting engagements, or the metadata collected by our products in our dynamic threat intelligence systems. If we discover that customer information was taken, we will contact them directly.

Cyber Warfare Has Its Potential Impact On Global Economy