By: Carl Herberger, Radware vice president of security solutions
Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) has been investigating OpParis, an Anonymous-credited revenge campaign against ISIS for the Paris attacks on November 13, 2015. Anonymous is a well-known hacktivist group that uses hacking to raise awareness of socio-political or socio-economic concerns or wrongdoing. They use a mix of methods, including distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), whereby networks are flooded with fake requests for a sustained and intense period, rendering the network servers useless.
This campaign is an aggressive operation targeting supporters and sympathisers of the Paris attack. Retaliation on French based companies following the Anonymous response to the attack in Paris is expected. Just as we saw with the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Anonymous condemns the terrorism. It has mobilised a team to gather information about the ISIS sympathisers.
The prolific spread of technology means it will be possible to undertake the unthinkable attack on a country where traditional terrorism is co–ordinated with cyber network attacks. Life’s essentials; water, food production, refrigeration, heat, light could be disabled very quickly right through to chasing mass destruction of power plants, and disruption to emergency services and aviation. Combined with a biological or incendiary attack, this makes for a very frightening prospect.
Automation is now a driving force behind many aspects of life, including the cyber-attack landscape. Anyone doubting this reality should consider that we’ve seen a more than 300% increase in organisations under constant cyber-attack, a sure indication that attacks now come from tireless machines. For those wondering how the security community should respond, the answer may well be a “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach where the same degree of automation is implemented into security management. We’ve reached a “my good bot against your bad bot” state in security. It’s a frightening prospect and is why governments are in the spotlight, and why big corporations need to ensure they do all they can – an insurance policy won’t be enough when lives are at risk.
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