Vanguard Magazine

20 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016 www.vanguardcanada.com C CYBer SECURITY Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodgate, the Canadian Contingent Commander, provides input into Crisis Action Planning during the PANAMAX 2015 Combined Forces Land Component Command training exercise at Fort Sam Houston, Texas from July 26 to August 5, 2015, which included scenarios involving simulated land-based, maritime and cyber threats to the Panama Canal. Why are cyber threats still a growing issue despite the billions spent countering them? Fluidity is one reason. By the very nature of technology, these threats span semantic and syntactic attacks (data theft and data modification) and cause malicious damage to critical systems and evolve faster than organizations can operationalize respons- es. In recent years, attacks have become increasingly sophisticated through the use of emerging technologies, complex plan- ning and multi-factored approaches that expanded to incorporate investigative and social engineering. The result has been hard-hitting, asym- metrical threats with mounting costs to the global economy. In the 2014 report, Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime, MacAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies' esti- mated that the global annual cost of cyber- crime was between $375 billion and $575 billion. However, for military and defence or- ganizations the damage that cyber threats could potentially wreak goes beyond the financial costs. Threat complexity is another reason for some stalled efforts. The term cyber threat and similar terms, such as cyber crime, are broad in their definitions and are more than the theft, modification or destruction of sensitive information. They encompass unauthorized access to any device, sys- tem, network or infrastructure with illegal or malicious intent, ranging from theft of emails to blackmail, embarrassment or discredit to the distribution of persistent malware to gather credit card numbers. When viewed at this level, it becomes obvi- ous that cyber security requires more than technological solutions to protect assets, control access and limit damage and risk. As well, organizations tend to view cyber threats as a local phenomenon and within silos; however, from trusted partners to the general public, all systems are intercon- nected, making cyber threats a global con- cern. But the foundational 'human' reason that cyber threats persist is that no single threat event has penetrated cross-sector and with a significant, long-lasting impact, enough to evoke a massive change in ap- proach and behaviour. Threat and domain knowledge, rather than technological solutions, hold the keys to establishing the agility, intelligence, in- formation sharing and balancing of offen- sive and defensive action required in the security planning and analysis phases. Cyber-threats: assessing assessments Regardless of their technological sophis- tication, attacks normally follow a similar process: identifying the target (recon- naissance), identifying the vulnerabilities (scanning), gaining access (access and es- calation), exploration and lying in wait

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