1 May 2015

A Grim Picture of the Evolving Global Cyber Espionage Threat

Sidney J. Freedberg, Jr.
April 29, 2015

GEORGETOWN: Four days after Defense Secretary Ash Carter launched the Pentagon’s new cyber strategy, experts and officials offered a grim picture of the global threat. The threat is metastasizing in ways that will require new kinds of defenses — even while many US companies and government agencies lag on basic cybersecurity measures.

“The Chinese in particular are cleaning us out” by exploiting well-known vulnerabilities it would be easy to patch, said Stephanie O’Sullivan, principal deputy to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Meanwhile, Russiaremains the most sophisticated threat, she told a Georgetown University cyber conference, while Iran and North Korea are less capable but more “unpredictable and aggressive.”

But sophisticated, destructive cyber threats no longer come only from nation-states, a panel of experts warned just hours later. “The nation-states of the world…no longer have a monopoly on developing this APT [advanced persistent threat] phenomenon,” said Tom Kellermann, the chief cybersecurity officer atTrend Micro. “You’re seeing the true commoditization” of hacking tools, he said.

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