In recent years, cybersecurity threats have changed in three important ways:
- The adversarial motivation has changed. Early attack programs were written as a result of an individual’s curiosity, more recent attacks are written by well-funded and trained militaries in support of cyberwarfare or by sophisticated criminal organizations. With ransomware, the paradigm has shifted to lockdown what information is valuable to the victims rather than only go after the information that was valuable to the attackers.
- The breadth and speed of attack adaptation have increased. The earlier attacks exploited software weaknesses found without any automation, were propagated using “sneakernet,” and affected single computers or clusters, today’s attacks exploit weaknesses found automatically; are automatically propagated over the Internet, packaged even by unsophisticated attackers; and affect computers, tablets, smartphones, and other devices across the globe – including critical information infrastructure.
- The potential impact of an intrusion has increased substantially. Globally connected devices and people mean that attacks affect not only the digital world as in the past but also the physical world through the Internet of Things (IoT) and the society at large through ubiquitous social media platforms.
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Source-Ministry of Electronic, Information & Technology, Government of India
