Dr Eric Winsborrow during his presentation at Qatar Computing Research Institute on Monday. Shaival Dalal
DOHA: State-sponsored cyber attacks are increasing around the world, with countries providing group resources to carry out Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), according to industry experts.
“Nation-state cyber attacks are ramping up extremely quickly and they are coming from all directions. It is a trend that will continue to increase,” Dr Craig Schultz from Zantt said on Monday.
He was speaking on the history and future of cyber warfare, a seminar organised by the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) as part of its plans to launch a cyber security research programme.
Experts said that countries today needed to realise that a new branch of attack in the form of cyber warfare was building up, and a branch of defence had to be developed against it. “Cyber war fighters and cyber activity is being created by nation-states. It is up to the individual countries now to decide what they want to do about that,” Eric Winsborrow said.
He said several countries are allocating budgets and resources to protect themselves from critical cyber threats. The US already has the ‘Tenth Fleet’ which is responsible for cyber warfare programmes.
“The (US) budget is gowning down in all areas except in three things: space, drones and cyber sectors. In China, it’s the same way. There is no cut in budget for cyber warfare. It is, in fact, one of the few increasing budgets,” Winsborrow said.
He said the modern-day ‘cyber war fighters’ were operating in the form of ‘troops’ with the kind of expertise that allowed them to carry out advanced attacks of three kinds.
This include organised cyber attacks used for short-term monetary gains, cyber espionage aimed at extracting information, as well as the much advanced weapon-based system that targeted critical infrastructures of companies and governments.
“Just like you have expertise in ammunitions, you now have expertise in cyber attacks. It’s just a branch of the military,” Winsborrow argued.
Dr Schultz said recent trends also showed that individual-hacking attacks were actually decreasing. Criminal organisations are also purchasing tools for many of these attacks at prices as low as $4 from an illicit black market, which is said to be as big as the commercial software market.
In terms of policy-making, Qatar, according to Winsborrow, had an advantage over other countries as it had the opportunity to start from scratch.
“One of the things that I think Qatar has advantage over on, and it needs the QCRI to support it, is that it has the ability to start from scratch. You have the ability to create the infrastructure in such a way that it is less vulnerable than the established infrastructure,” Winsborrow said.
He said anyone with an established infrastructure was by definition obsolete to new attacks because cyber criminals had already figured out how to get past them.
The Peninsula
