The Cybercrime ‘Five’ Part Five: Cyber Soldiers
Who: This is nation-state activity to penetrate another nation or corporations computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage, disruption or exploitation with an endgame objective of disabling an opponent's military capability or stealing important source code to increase their own power. These guys are the special forces of the threat landscape; super skilled buzz-cut clean shaven expert hackers. You’d never know who they were however – because if I told you I’d have to kill you.
Why: Cyber Warfare has been described of as the fifth domain of warfare with the Pentagon formally recognizing cyberspace to be just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air and space. It is reported that at least 100 countries have been developing ways to use the Internet as a weapon and target financial markets, government computer systems and utilities. Cyber Soldiers may operate as APT (advanced persistent threat) or corporate spies at times, but everything they learn is geared toward a specific nationalist objective.
What: Stuxnet is a great example of this attack method, a text book case of an APT. The Worm was discovered July 2010 and is the first specialized complex malware to only target industrial software. It was aimed at compromising the Iranian nuclear program and believed to be the work of a well funded group of 5-10 people over 6 months. Speculation: only a nation state has these capabilities.
