Today lets take a closer look at some recent successful cyber-attacks. Some of these, no one saw it coming . to be sure cyber attacks can be successful or extinguished from the very start. But the iron-cloud rule of cyber attacks is that they come in many forms, from all directions and from incredibly different sources.
Let the count down some of the more interesting ones.
MAFIA BOY DENIAL OF SERVICE
Michael calce, aka Mafiaboy, then 15yrs old claimed that he had unknowingly input several widely known IP addresses into a security tool he had downloaded from the web. Being a teenager, calce wen off to school and when he returned home, to find his exploit were plastered all over the news. Denial of service attacks, like mafia boy flood a site with traffic disabling its ability to serve legitimate users. Yahoo which at the time, was the world most used search engine collapsed.Buy.com, eBay, CNN, Amazon were all bought down for several hours, costing billions in the aftermath.
CONFLICKER
In 2008, this worn exploited a number of windows operating systems. It then linked these computers together into a massive botnet, which was a new idea at the time. Conficker had several spoils of victory, Including the Creation of a whole new class of threats and leaving many world leaders no choice but to call in a favour from other nations to mitigate the attack.
Jonathan James
James breached the United State Department of Defense in 1999, stealing passwords, confidential messages and software designed for space exploration and us military. In the 1960s, John F Kennedy famously urged the United State to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard. But 30 yrs later, NASA had to shut down its entire network for 3 weeks, costing millions in response to James's brute force attack.
SONY PICTURES
The Guardians of Peace (GOP) fessed up to the crime by releasing a trove of sensitive data, including emails, personal information, messages and correspondence, employee salaries and even snatching several sony films. The group used a modified Shamoon wiper malware with a mechanism to wipe hard drives data, Unlike the typical goal of steal data, this malware hurts victims by completely eliminating their valuable information.
MELLISA VIRUS
David Smith is, perhaps the discovery of phishing attacks .taking you to America online chat group, Smith posted a document claiming to have credential to several websites but whose true content was the mellisa virus.
Melissa then went viral .spawing itself across the global email servers and several tech-savvy companies, including Microsoft, Intel, Lockheed Martin, were forced to shut down their email services after melissa cause over $80 million in damages.
Attacks are inevitable but successful attacks are not but when we lock our focus on cyber resilience we can withstand the unending parade of attacks and by persisting our security posture and maintaining the line of sight, the attacks surface is compressed and becomes an inhospitable place for an attacker to win.
very nice post