Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and U.S. president Barack Obama met for 90 minutes during September’s G20 summit in Hangzhou, China, at a time when at least some American officials believed that Russia conducted several cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and voter registration systems in the U.S. Obama specifically told the gathering of world leaders that the U.S. is prepared to respond to any attacks. However, given the number and depth of the assaults on both the U.S. and other countries, it is hard to imagine that our systems are truly safe today.
Attacks on technology aren’t new, and, in fact, the first instance of such an act can be traced back more than 110 years ago to Nevil Maskelyne, a British music hall magician. Maskelyne was also an inventor who was self-taught in the principles of wireless communication. Three years before Guglielmo Marconi’s demonstration of Morse code over wireless telegraphy, Maskelyne had sent a wireless message between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away.
The book Wireless, by Sungook Hong, describes how Maskelyne was so frustrated at the terms of the patent that Marconi was able to get—which, in effect, guaranteed a windfall for Marconi and cut off any serious competition—that he disrupted Marconi’s demonstration of his “secure and private” wireless telegraphy system in 1903, with a message repeating the word “rats” and then a series of insults to Marconi. In a newspaper letter published a few days later, Maskelyne admitted his role in the stunt, defending his actions as providing proof that Marconi’s system was neither secure nor private and thus a public concern. Maskelyne’s demonstration failed to stop Marconi’s venture, but it represents an ominous early warning of how technology could be used for good or otherwise.
Given the rise of crimeware and crime-as-a-service (CaaS) cloud offerings that provide less tech-savvy cybercriminals with ready-made malware and other hacking tools (with some including money-back guarantees and 24/7 chat support), Shipley said, “We’re seeing a massive growth in cybercriminal entrepreneurism. The expansion of ransomware means that even universities and colleges/researchers not in the [STEM] spaces will be increasingly targeted, as again it’s not so much about the external value of data. And then there’s the rise of DDoS (distributed denial of service) extortions, and if Rutgers is any example, this will be an incredibly expensive and painful issue for universities and colleges.” Rutgers University was the target of several DDoS attacks, starting in November 2014, which brought down a few of the school’s networks and websites.
Shipley says, “On the technology side, we need a more secure global internet where security is baked in, not bolted on as an after-thought. We’ve built this entire vital part of the modern global economy as an as-we-go approach and that has created the perfect conditions of insecurity. We need to look at cybersecurity from the ground-up, starting with the protocols we use to transmit data to the mechanisms in which we build and verify trust relationships.” This is especially important with the rise of IoT in the areas of transportation and medicine, he says.
Shackelford also sees a major role for each of us in the new form of warfare. “Social engineering is a huge part of the multi-faceted cyber threat,” he says. “But it is merely an updated version of an age-old scam that manipulates people into divulging sensitive information, but those updates make it cutting edge. Today’s attackers often research a user’s web history, perhaps accessing his Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account to learn about him and tailor attacks. In response, organizations at all levels need to educate their employees about how to detect social engineering attacks, such as by running regular spoof tests to see the percentage of employees that click on a given link.
“Even if we can’t stop cyberattacks,” Shackelford concludes, “we can certainly manage them more effectively, such as by taking a networked and distributed approach to a networked and distributed problem, in the words of Robert Knake.” Knake is a former director of cybersecurity policy for the National Security Council.
In July 2016, a senior executive from Google said that the company is notifying customers about 4,000 state-sponsored cyberattacks each month. With such a staggering assault, no one can ignore the dangers lurking from within and without of our internet society.
Nancy K. Herther is the American studies, anthropology, Asian American studies, and sociology librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries–Twin Cities. Send your comments about this article to itletters@infotoday.com.