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Cyber Threats And The Cyber Threat

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In recent years information security and privacy have come to be topics of high importance with rapid technological advancements. Technology has provided vast areas of opportunities, but these have also brought along unprecedented threats. Since the “Morris” worm in the 1980’s cyber threat has grown from isolated incidents to high profile attacks on major government and private organizations. Cyber threats can be classified broadly into three distinct areas –  Cyber crime – intentional attacks carried out by individuals or groups of individuals with specific objectives of acquiring money, data or causing disruption.  Cyber war – an attack conducted by a nation against another nation with the objective to cause disruption or obtain…show more content…
Two popular and large-scale self-propagating worms in 2001 are Code Red and NIMDA. The motivation for the attackers of both these worms were to gain notoriety and fame. Code Red exploited buffer overflow vulnerability in the IIS server of Microsoft. NIMDA on the other hand used multiple propagation techniques such as email, network sharing, exploiting directory traversal vulnerabilities of Microsoft IIS server. These widespread attacks led to the adoption of Intrusion detection systems. 3. Monetary benefit The third phase began around 2004 with the social engineering technique of phishing. The attacks attempted the victims to reveal passwords, identity information and payment card details which would then be used to extract money. 4. Threat and destruction The phase began in 2007/08 with the distributed denial of service attacks launched against Georgia and Estonia. The significant attack in this phase was in 2010 with the Stuxnet, the first malware that was able to compromise industrial control systems. This was significant because it showed that cyber threats were now not limited to servers, software, data and continuity but affected safety as well. Around this same time started the Advanced Persistent Threats. 5. Future Cyber-attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and varied targeting various high profile multinational companies. The target until now has been financial information and other critical
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