Reply To: OCU ISSO Week 5 Lesson 17 Discussion
IST3100 Information Systems Security Officer
Week Five
Assignment # 3
WK5 Cyberattacks story
Kevin Mehok
I think that sourcing an actual story for this discussion will be the most effective approach.
In this era of time, we have been hearing a lot about Russia, and Ukraine. For years, Russia has aggressively and recklessly mounted digital attacks against Ukraine, causing blackouts, attempting to skew elections, stealing data, and releasing destructive malware to rampage across the country—and the world (Newman, 2022). Sadly, Russia carried through with invading Ukraine in February, though, the digital dynamic between the two countries has changed as Russia struggles to support a massive and costly kinetic war and Ukraine mounts resistance on every front it can think of (Newman, 2022). What does this mean? Well, this means that while Russia has continued to pummel Ukrainian institutions and infrastructure with cyberattacks, Ukraine has also been hacking back with surprising success (Newman, 2022). In defense, much like our need to create and implement an action plan, Ukraine has formed a volunteer “IT Army” at the beginning of the war, which has focused on mounting DDoS attacks and disruptive hacks against Russian institutions and services to cause as much chaos as possible (Newman, 2022). Hacktivists from around the world have also turned their attention—and digital firepower—toward the conflict (Newman, 2022). In a valiant effort Ukraine has launched other types of hacks against Russia, including attacks utilizing custom malware, Russia has suffered data breaches and service disruptions at an unprecedented scale (Newman, 2022).
While we discuss over and over the negatives of malware and virus attacks, cyberattacking, yes cyberattacking can also in and of itself be an incredible form of offense, in defense just as it has been for Ukraine.
I would be willing to keep approaches like this in mind as well if my organization were attacked.
God Bless,
Kevin
References:
Newman, L. (2022) https://www.wired.com/story/worst-hacks-breaches-2022/
