Google maps have gone haywire, your morning workout route has disappeared, and your phone remains silent. What happened? There may have been an attack on satellites who manage the infrastructure we depend on for everyday life. Many human activities carried out on Earth are in fact based on space systems for communication, navigation, weather forecasts, climate monitoring, up to the management of fishing and agricultural production. And that they suddenly stop working for a cyber attack has already happened.
In a crowded conference attended by journalists from all over the world, i Thales Media Daysthe French security giant ThalesGroup has shown how all this can happen and not just due to human error, but due to the ability of criminals and hostile actors to interfere with the daily operations that affect the lives of millions of citizens, such as the management of digital identity, mobility, the health system, transport, defense and remote work.
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“The increase in cyber attacks is almost proportional to the speed of the digital transformation. The more connected our world is, the greater its attack surface will be. For greater speed and efficiencyan increasing number of companies are connecting suppliers to corporate IT systems, potentially suggesting new ways for cybercriminals to breach their data and find the weak link in the supply chain to gain access to the information systems of companies and state institutions. ”Said Patrice Caine, general manager of Thales.
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So the question is: Could we help but use our digital identity to get banking care and services? It could, of course, but it would make our life more complicated. We can use computer systems lightly that make our life easier? No, in the event of identity theft we could end up in a Dante’s circle since most of the public administration services are now dematerialized and queuing at the counter seems like a memory. Unfortunately the cyber attacks to this they aim, to interrupt the digital services on which we depend more and more, with the addition of making it impossible for us to work and with the risk of losing the company we have created.
he cyberatlas
Faced with this scenario, Thalesgroup has published a manual of cyber threats, a sort of World atlas of the tools, groups and techniques used in cyber attacks, a voluminous book, also available digitally, in which it brings together all the old new threats we have seen in action in recent years.
From the Russian hackers who tried to influence the elections in America to the Chinese hackers dedicated to industrial espionage, from the use of cyberwares by the Syrian Electronic Army to the days of the Kaseya supply chain attacks hit by the REvil ransomware group, to those against SolarWinds to wiper malware used against Ukraine in recent months.
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The Atlas recalls how from 2020 to 2021 there was an increase in attacks suffered by Europe equal to 30%. The reason is explained by the same analysts who wrote the manual: Europe is a mosaic of cultures, identities, economies where spheres of power such as the European Union, NATO and Russia meet, which sometimes conflict with each other. and whose divergences can be used as elements of destabilization by cyber attackers. Also because “Europe is highly integrated in global processes and has important industrial and financial champions, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises that represent permanent targets of organized cyber crime and large-scale industrial espionage”.
The Manual has its own dynamic version on the web, The Cyber Threat Hitmap, which allows you to see in real-time, minute by minute, the individual attacks conducted by the 50 most important hacker groups, such as ATK113 (FIN8) and ATK116 (also known as Cloud Atlas) that hit many European countries, including Italy, or like ATK13, known as Turla, which managed to breach the US Department of Defense, and those of many others who hit with their fancy-named malware, Emotet , Shamoon, Mimikatz, numerous companies in the school, energy, telecommunications, Defense, aerospace sectors.
The manual, with an explicit geopolitical focus, explains the techniques, tactics and procedures used by each group, identifies their motivations, financial or political, espionage or ideological, retraces its history and finally lists all the names with which they were identified by the defenders who tried to put salt on their tail. And for this reason they also recall the path of groups such as the Cybercaliphate which “although silent for about two years, could have dissolved within or reoriented to other jihadist groups”.
Thales Group, the security corporation
To understand how to respond to cyber threats, the French company, 81,000 employees, present in 70 countries with a volume of 16 billion in sales, has created specific applications to train its staff. Practical and immersive courses, based on realistic simulation contexts which, in the case of Thales, use the digital twin of a seaport and also a Cyber Range that allows you to simulate attack and response situations by teams who sometimes play the role of defenders, sometimes those of attackers, to understand how hackers gain access to protected systems and what techniques they use. All using the game as a learning opportunity. An approach that is similar to that of our national champion, Leonardo, who also created his own in Genoa Cyber Academy and that he has several collaborations with Thales.
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To hide the most important digital assets, the experts of the French group have also developed proprietary solutions. As he reiterated Patrice Caine a Italian Tech, “That of technological sovereignty is a big question. We do not want to give up the technologies developed by our partners, but we believe that strategic autonomy is a concept of particular importance for every country in the Union. This is also why we are interested in developing European cooperation better and encouraging public-private initiatives ”.
In the last two weeks EasyJet about 200 flights had to be canceled and had online booking and check-in problems that forced passengers to show up at the airport hours before departure. Cyber attacks or disservices? Difficult to say, but we certainly know that attacks targeting airlines are on the rise: from 45 cyberattacks in 2019, we have gone to 775 in 2020. Airplanes are increasingly connected and depend on data communication from the ground. Even in the tourist season we cannot rest on our laurels.