CYBER WARFARE- international concern

Today cyber security is a major concern for all countries and all nations need to be prepared for a massive attack that will take down their facilities. In traditional war the attacker starts by using air force to target critical systems in the country, this operation will make the enemy out of control of his army and decrease the communication in the country.Technology is changing and I think that cyber-attack going to be the first operation in any traditional war.  If you penetrate their cyberspace first  you will be able to gather very important information that can be used in the war, for example, number of soldiers, number of airports and types of systems used in the army communication etc…

Many countries may feel they are not going to be affected by this type of warfare as they have no political conflicts but this is not true.  For example, the cyber war between Pakistan and India where they used online search engines to identify vulnerable websites in Africa to deface them and transmit  messages regarding the situation in the region.

To protect cyberspace it is very important to create a national strategy for all countries citizens that will include an action plan to protect their cyber borders.   The first thing is identifying what we are looking to protect for example 

hospitals , ministries , governmental institutions, media establishments , personal information and so on.

Next, we apply security standards and best practices to guarantee the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information at these organizations, by conducting a constant audit of the existing information systems.  The audits can be twice a year or more, this will help us to understand if we are vulnerable to cyber-attacks or not.

During the cyber-attack all people are involved, so we need to create a cybersecurity awareness and training program for individuals including the small family.  We can create a kind of cartoons to transmit the information to children’s or movies for parents.  This will raise the security awareness and make them educated about cyber-attack weapons like malwares. Training of technical staff is also important to acquire the knowledge of how to make our systems protected and what kind of threats are facing cyberspace.Vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily bases and this makes the vulnerability assessment and penetration testing an important part of the strategy to make your system as much as possible, free from new bugs discovered in different software packages.  This can be by alerting all citizens of new vulnerabilities via mailing lists and how it is possible to fix these vulnerabilities.

Also Implementing honeypots for catching and detecting infected machines in the national cyberspace and launching a cyber-security community coordination (such as Honeynet project (1), Shadowserver(2), CERT’s (3)) to mitigate malware threats. This coordination can help by learning from other countries experience in defending their cyber boarders. Clean-up services is a very important activity that makes your cyber space safe, we can imagine the number of bot networks existing in the world and they may be used in a cyber-attack at any moment. Removing malwares from infected hosts will mitigate this threat by providing free tools and assistance if they are required by victims.Finally, an important question that many ask is how prepared are 

we for cyber-warfare? 

The answer is that we are finding a very promising situation that needs laws  The and priorities for cyber security cooperation in the international community. Many stakeholders understand the importance of protecting cyber-space to make it clean from malwares and cybercriminals.

Reference:

(1) The Honeynet Project http://www.honeynet.org/

(2) Shadowserver http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/

(3) CERT-CC http://www.cert.org/ (3)

About Author :

Mourad Ben Lakhoua is an Information Security practitioner.

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