Tag: CYBER-KINETIC SECURITY

A growing number of today’s entertainment options show protagonists battling cyber-attacks that target the systems at the heart of our critical infrastructure whose failure would cripple modern society. It’s easy to watch such shows and pass off their plots as something that could never happen. The chilling reality is that those plots are often based on real cyber-kinetic threats that either have already happened, are already possible, or are dangerously close to becoming reality. Cyberattacks occur daily around the world. Only when one achieves sufficient scope to grab the attention of the news media – such as the WannaCry ransomware...

The fact that cyber-kinetic attacks rarely appear on mainstream news doesn’t mean they don’t happen. They happen more frequently than you would think. Many, for various reasons, aren’t even reported to agencies charged with combatting them. This hinders security experts in understanding the full scope and recognizing the trends in this growing problem. We’ll highlight examples of cyber-kinetic incidents and attacks in this chapter. Some were malfunctions that, nonetheless, demonstrated cyber-physical system vulnerabilities. Some were collateral damage from hacking or computer viruses. The vulnerabilities these exposed inspired a growing number of targeted cyber-kinetic attacks in recent years. The Beginning of Cyber-Kinetic...

Below is a timeline of key historic cyber-kinetic attacks, system malfunctions and key researcher demos targeting cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) resulting in kinetic impacts in the physical world. I tried to select only those that were first-of-the-kind or that significantly increased general awareness about a particular type of an attack or incident I know that the list is incomplete. That’s where you come in. If you are aware of an incident or a research that demonstrated something new regarding cyber-kinetic threats or helped significantly raise the awareness, please contact me. For a more...

You may have heard, over the last year or two, about the new technological miracle that is the blockchain. It seems that every banker, insurer, manufacturer, artist, lawyer and cybersecurity professional is shouting about blockchain from the highest peak and telling us how it will be used to secure everything against anything for all time, additionally removing those embarrassing blemishes from our skin and freshening our breath at the same time. Clearly some large portion of the blockchain-related content we see in the media is hyperbolic, at best, but it is an important technology nonetheless. Let’s take a look...

The attacker stepped out from behind a hedge in the upper-class suburban neighborhood, being careful to stay in the shadows. Across the street, the last lights shining through the windows of the house had just flickered out. She tugged the bottom of her black hoodie into place and pulled the hood up over her head, casting her face deeper in shadow. Her target sat in the driveway at the front of the house, a bright red and completely decked out SUV. Glancing up and down the street to ensure no one was looking, she slipped across the street into the...

Below is my attempt to list of all published 5G, IoT and "Smart Everything"-related security guidelines, frameworks and standards. If you are aware of additional entries that should be here, please let me know at [email protected]

We live in a world in which the way we observe and control it is radically changing. Increasingly, we interact with physical objects through the filter of what computational systems embedded in them tell us, and we adjust them based on what those systems relate. We do this on our phones, in our cars, in our homes, in our factories and, increasingly, in our cities. Physical objects are so interconnected that we simply take those connections for granted, as if being able to unlock your car by pushing a button on your key fob, unlocking it with your phone or...

“Cyber war” is a term that is in recent days used so liberally that people may often wonder if these words are as menacing as they sound or used only as a tool to incite fear as a way to control a society that increasingly depends on technology. How we prepare and respond to cyber attacks depends on whether we believe we are in cyber war. It influences how we estimate the risks, potential impacts, or insurance premiums. Preparation for and response to cyber war implies government involvement and that might mean handing over the control of our networks to...