To Stop Hackers, Treat Them Like a Disease

NOT A WEEK GOES BY without a cyberattack making headlines. These, however, are the attacks that should concern us least. The real danger comes from quiet and elusive hackers who infiltrate and blend into a network. Like a secret agent behind enemy lines, these undetectable viruses can have an organization under complete and total surveillance, waiting months or even years before making an attack. When the malware becomes active, which may be for only a few seconds, it can prove fatal.

Last November, around the time of Ukraine’s local elections, a type of malware called BlackEnergy was used to hack into Ukranian media companies, rendering their operating systems unbootable. In December, BlackEnergy targeted power companies in western Ukraine with great precision, causing a blackout that affected more than 225,000 civilians. A month later, in January, BlackEnergy was also detected on the IT network of Kiev’s main airport, including air-traffic control systems. We’re also seeing an alarming rise of ransomware, a form of extortion in which malware hacks into an operating system, encrypts critical data and demands that the organization or individual pay an exorbitant fee to obtain the decryption keys. The longer the victim hesitates to pay, the higher the cost of decryption. For the full article click here 

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