Security News > 2020 > September > Business top brass are terrified their companies will simply be collateral damage in a future cyber-war

Businesses are worrying about being caught in the crossfire of cyber warfare, according to research from Bitdefender - while industry figures warn that the gap between common-or-garden cyber threats and "Oh, look what nation states are doing" is becoming ever smaller.

Bitdefender's latest report, titled 10 in 10, surveyed around 6,000 C-suite bods responsible for cyber security and found [PDF] "Over a fifth" of these said that cyber warfare was one of the most challenging topics they had to convince their colleagues to take seriously.

It could also include attacks designed to degrade an adversary's own ability to mount cyber attacks; cyber on cyber.

Ingram told us: "In 2017 the Shamoon virus attack on Saudi Aramco, who pump 10 per cent of the world's oil, saw over 30,000 computers physically destroyed in what was believed to be a revenge attack for the Stuxnet malware that attacked Iran's nuclear enriching facilities. All of these incidents were small-scale focused attacks that caused wider unforeseen collateral damage. Should a full-scale cyber conflict ever start, the potential consequences for anything connected to the internet are frightening."

Arsene pointed to the Shadow Brokers vuln revelations as another example of how cyber warfare tools leak into the wider world, saying: "After were leaked, they were weaponised to infect [others] with Wannacry, hundreds of thousands of computers. Initially NSA weaponised that vulnerability, it was a military-grade cyber weapon. Inevitably it was used against everybody, not just governments. It also affected organisations of all sizes and verticals."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/09/30/cyber_war_fears/