World War III could be waged… on YOUR websites.
It’s no secret that hackers present a very specific risk to internet users through underhanded tactics such as Phishing, viruses, and bot-nets, but recently, the United Nations has proclaimed that the next world war could be fought solely in cyberspace.
I’m sure your initial thought is that hackers from countries like China, North Korea, and similar countries would wage the wars on our government’s websites for sensitive information (CIA, NSA, etc). However, it’s important to realize that our country, and our world, has become dependent upon our websites to run our businesses. Should a country decide to wage cyber-war on another country, they aren’t only going to go after the sensitive government information, but they are going after the heart of our economy as well. They will do this by waging war on private websites in order to strike a blow to the country’s economy.
If you think this is a simple over-exaggeration, consider this. Our firm responded to a frantic call from one of our clients last year after being successfully hacked. The initial review of the security breach by our firm noted that the hackers simply changed the home page to boast the successful hack of the website. Further investigation by us found that the hackers corrupted most files on the website as well as installed software on the server in order to add this server to their “bot-net” (a bot-net is a number of servers, several thousand usually, that have been hacked and are turned into a server-zombie with it’s sole purpose to carry out orders by the hackers – usually sending viruses, SPAM and carrying out denial of service attacks on other sites).
The hack on our client’s server was reversed and they were back online within a few hours. We further researched the hack and traced it back to a user in North Korea. Just as our government is putting in place thousands of new professionals to thwart cyber-attacks on our country, other, malicious governments are hiring thousands of hackers to carry out these attacks.
