(Newswire.net — November 17, 2016) –Cyberattacks have permeated the 2016 election cycle in the United States with multiple news stories over alleged hacking by foreign and other interests into email accounts. These high-profile cyberattack events have grabbed the attention of mainstream news organizations that previously relegated coverage of those events to specialty new sources. The reality of the situation is that cyberattacking has become more prevalent both in its sophistication and its frequency than has been reported by the leading news sources.
In a 2015 interview with Bloomberg News, Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure Oyj Security and Privacy Company, opined that every Fortune 500 company had already experienced some form of security breach. He noted that the very size of a large company’s electronic infrastructure makes it nearly impossible to prevent cyberattacks, as attackers will find weaknesses somewhere in those infrastructures.
Unlike high-profile cyberattacks that might dominate the news over an extended period of time, many cyberattacks are either ignored or are quickly forgotten. Many incidents represent advanced security attacks that pose serious risks for governments, corporations, and individuals. Consider, for example:
– In 2011, the Japanese defense contractor, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., reported that its information systems had been compromised. Some reports suggested that hackers might have gained access to sensitive information on nuclear power and missile components, although the company reported that its data remained intact after the attack.
– The electrical power grid in the United States has experienced a barrage of cyberattacks throughout the past four years. The Energy Department has reported more than 1,100 cyberattacks on different parts of the grid over that time, with more than 150 of those attacks showing some level of success.
– In February 2014, a group of cyber attackers in Iran hacked the Las Vegas Sands Casino in which they successfully shut down computers and servers and wiped several hard drives. This attack was apparently a response to comments that the Sands CEO had made about the Iranian government.
– A 2014 cyberattack on the Uber ride-sharing service compromised the personal information of more than 50,000 Uber drivers. Uber has experienced additional attacks that have grabbed passenger data and contact information.
– Governments and private industries are not the only cyberattack targets. In 2015, Penn State University’s College of Engineering revealed that it had been targeted by cyberattackers for more than two years and that personal data about more than 18,000 students may have been taken.
– The personal data of more than 200,000 users of the popular messaging service, WhatsApp, was leaked to hackers who initiated a cyberattack on the company in 2015.
Entities that have been targeted by cyberattackers are often reluctant to release information about the attacks out of concerns over their stock prices and public images. For example, the United Kingdom telecom and broadband provider, TalkTalk, suffered a cyberattack in October 2015. When news of the cyberattack broke, the company initially refused to let customers out of their contracts without paying termination fees. The company ultimately lost over 100,000 subscribers and suffered almost £60 million in financial losses following the attack.
As may be expected, the growing prevalence of cyberattacks has spawned a new industry of players all promising to stop advanced security attacks. These companies have developed real-time data analysis solutions that can be implemented in a SaaS environment across all technology platforms to protect the integrity of an organization’s digital systems. Many of these solutions use advanced artificial intelligence to distinguish between normal and abnormal data flow and queries into an organization’s system. As cyberattackers gain sophistication, all organizations would be well-served to implement these solutions in their digital environments.