“The type of threats you might be preparing for don’t necessarily match you as an organization. And now, with the emergence of untraceable cryptocurrency, there’s little or no way for these criminals to get caught. Instead, the cyberattacks are executed by state-sponsored hackers who are looking to fund other terrorism as well as lone criminals looking to strike it rich off the vulnerabilities of others. The most interesting thing about WannaCry and its ilk is that there are no jolly hackers orchestrating the infections. “If a machine is vulnerable…it can get in and propagate.” In addition, these threats are created by a small number of bad actors spread out across the world who are looking for financial gain while globally disrupting businesses. In other words, this isn’t a piece of malware that you have to get a user to click on or you have to get them to visit a website to infect them,” explained Forrester principal analyst Jeff Pollard on the company’s “What It Means” podcast. “What’s interesting about is that it spread via the network. Security executives were left with systems that had illicitly encrypted data that would stay that way indefinitely unless they were willing to pay a ransom for the key. Today, those threats seem quaint as security professionals grapple with the likes of ransomware such WannaCry, which infected more than 300,000 systems across the globe in less than a day. Consumers and businesses used good antivirus software that searched computers for known entities and was updated monthly, weekly and, eventually, daily.
The fix for these computer bugs was simple. In subsequent decades, more aggressive viruses were introduced that attacked a user’s contact list and overwrote files. The Brain virus, one of the earliest forms of ransomware (though its creators would remove it for free), went worldwide over a short period of time. In 1986, the first malicious virus was discovered. Some even say the first viruses were designed as practical jokes. The first viruses or worms were less harmful, designed to slow a system down or annoy other users. Choose your weapon: Staying ahead of the cyberthreats of today and tomorrow.Ĭyberthreats and attacks have been a negative side effect of our computer age for more than three decades.
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