Cyberattacks from Nation-States and Cybercriminals

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Effects of Cyberattacks
The SolarWinds and Marriot Data Breach Cases
Approaches to Discover Stealth, Hidden, and Obfuscated Attack Vectors
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Cyberattacks from nation-states and cybercriminals have affected the world by interfering with critical messages and information. Spear-phishing, fake personas, and bogus company profiles are some means that nation-states and cybercriminals use to conduct cyberattacks. The cyberattacks relate to infrastructure, military security, and businesses, and the nation-states and cybercriminals use them to distort critical messages for decision-making in these institutions. In businesses, cybercriminals may use their ability to embezzle themselves into the company’s supply chain by counterfeiting information and websites. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act provides guidelines and laws that protect firms from intrusion by restricted audiences through hacking. This report extracts information about the advanced cyberattacks from nation-states and cybercriminals. It also discusses approaches to discover stealth, hidden and obfuscated attack vectors that can be hidden in regular data infrastructure, including servers, workstations, and the operating systems and applications within those devices.

Effects of Cyberattacks

Nation-states use cyberattacks to create tension in the victim states by altering the security systems. The nation-states’ attacks relate to infrastructure, military, and businesses that result in unprepared decision-making or failure in operation. The attacks may be through complex technological systems or, at times, simple processes. Cybercriminals prefer to use social engineering techniques to trap the target audience in contributing to information leakage. They use social media platforms to send spear-phishing emails and websites that are attractive to the recipient. The recipient opens the phished emails, not knowing they are exposing themselves and their organization to the risks of information loss. Information integrity and protection should be critical areas for consideration and emphasis for all organizations. Companies must educate their employees on how to take caution and alarm in cases of susceptible intrusion.

Cybercriminals and nation-states participate in cyberattacks to influence public opinion and create military espionage while manipulating critical government decision-making processes. Enemies may use cyberattacks to propagate rumors about the organizations and ruin their reputations. Influencing crowds to hate a country’s leadership causes conflict, leading to an unbalanced reaction. Similarly, foes may use cybercrimes to interfere with a country’s security and military systems by relaying incorrect information to the controllers. The hackers also steal data from the victims without permission causing a loss in the reliability of the data. In business, propagators of cybercrimes may conduct attacks to inflate infrastructural assets and steal trade secrets. The process causes commotion within the organization and may result in business failure to conduct market operations.

The SolarWinds and Marriot Data Breach Cases

Countries may attack particular organs of their neighboring countries by stealing critical information surrounding their security systems businesses and interfering with critical events like elections. Such breach of cyber rights disrupts victimized countries and contributes to the loss of crucial files. The process is costly for the affected firms since there are many inconveniences as the firms have to shift their attention to retrieving their files and trying to secure their systems from similar attacks. In the recent past, the United States, through the Solar Wind company that develops software for businesses and government agencies, experienced a cyberattack in 2020. The breach existed for several months without causing alarm until mid-December of the same year. Donald Trump, the former president of the United States of America, blamed China for the attacks (Jaworsky &Oiaoan, 2021). However, other government agencies later blamed the Russian government for the breach. The initial lack of accurate information on the propagator indicated that cyber attackers and nation-states prefer being incognito rather than public.

Another significant incidence of cyberattack was the Marriot Data breach in 2014 which was not discovered until 2018 when an internal security tool identified suspicious access into the guest reservation data for Marriot Starwood Hotels. The alert escalated to demand better investigations that discovered that the hotel’s database was under siege before Marriot’s takeover in 2016 (Sanger, Perlroth, Thrush & Rappeport, 2018). The breach led to the theft of customers’ information from contacts, emails, date of birth, gender, and many more. The attack attracted penalties and fines that contributed to losses in the 2018 financial period. It took a long period to notice the problems hence a more significant loss in resources and data.

Approaches to Discover Stealth, Hidden, and Obfuscated Attack Vectors

Stealth Detection

Stealth is a sub-discipline of military tactics that comprise electronic countermeasures that are difficult to detect. However, very high ultra-frequencies (V/UHF) can detect secret activities. Very high ultra-frequencies possess a similar magnitude as stealth; hence their signal is affected by a resonant that is not affected by stealth (Yener, 2018). Thus, it is easy for them to detect stealth and have gained emphasis on their application despite being of poor resolution that picked noise, including clouds and rain.

Hidden Attack Vectors

It is often difficult for businesses to detect breaching in time because some of the hacker’s tactics are too personalized, for instance, spear-phishing that sends mail to specific individuals. However, organizations should engage in practices that aid in raising the alarm in case their systems detect offenders. One way they can use to detect hidden attack vectors is to accommodate antivirus software in their operations to detect upcoming threats. Antivirus software notices many unwanted activities like malware, spyware, ransomware, and malicious emails to provoke the recipients into falling into traps.

Obfuscated Attack Vectors

Obfuscation is creating a code that is unintelligible to handle that initially gave security for applications and other computer software. However, some people use them to create malware that destroys other people’s computers by altering the coding system (Ndichu et al., 2019). Encryption, data masking, and tokenization are standard means of obfuscation hackers use to waste time for the targets and bypass code analysts. Companies may monitor obfuscated attack vectors by using a threat detection log. Detection logs contain information about all events occurring within a company’s cyber systems. Reviewing logs helps eliminate possible threats by changing the codes. Additionally, the firms may use automated monitoring systems to secure their property and monitor the employees’ behavior (Mavroeidis & Josang, 2018). The process requires one to think like the attacker to extract all the looming threats in the systems.

Benefits of Threat Hunting

Threat hunting plays a critical role in an organization since it offers protection from violators. Organizations must consider all means they can use to secure their data systems because hacking may be detrimental to their development. Businesses must protect their insider information from workers who engage in malicious activities that may leak security passwords and patterns. Threat hunting protects organizations from possible threats by attacking surface exposure. It also reduces the time between the occurrence of the threat and the response, thus reducing the impact of the damage caused on the organization. Moreover, the process facilitates a speedy and accurate response to cybercrimes (Schmitt, Kandah, and Brownell, 2019). Threat hunting exposes the company to the types of insecurities likely to occur. Thus, the business gains experience in creating an effective response team. It gives the business awareness of its weaknesses concerning cyber security techniques and uncovers the traitors within the organization. Businesses must have a cybersecurity department to conduct threat hunts to unmask previously unknown and ongoing non-remediated threats.

Conclusion

Social media platforms are the main avenues for the trending of cybercrimes because hackers send vindictive data to extract information unlawfully from the person or find a way to steal important organizational trade secrets. Besides hacking business systems, other agencies that face similar problems are government agencies that hold vital information systems regarding the country. The government has illegalized hacking and other computer fraudulent behaviors through the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, thus ensuring controlled attacks. Organizations should work concurrently with other governmental and non-governmental agencies that aid in upholding their rights.

References

Jaworsky, B. N., & Qiaoan, R. (2021). The politics of blaming: The narrative battle between China and the US over COVID-19. Journal of Chinese Political Science, 26(2), 295-315.

Ndichu, S., Kim, S., Ozawa, S., Misu, T., & Makishima, K. (2019). A machine learning approach to detection of JavaScript-based attacks using AST features and paragraph vectors. Applied Soft Computing, 84, 105721.

Mavroeidis, V., & Jøsang, A. (2018, March). Data-driven threat hunting using Symon. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (pp. 82-88).

Sanger, D. E., Perlroth, N., Thrush, G., & Rappeport, A. (2018). Marriott Data Breach Traced to Chinese Hackers. The New York Times, A1-L.

Schmitt S., Kandah F. I., and Brownell D. 2019. “Intelligent threat hunting in software-defined networking,” 2019 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), pp. 1-5.

Yener, Ü. (2018). Radar performance analysis approaches for the evaluation of radar systems (Master’s thesis, Middle East Technical University).

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