JAN - JUNE 2019CYBERSECURITY REVIEW 19 We have all heard of the various attacks on businesses like ransomware, business email compromise (BEC) and hacker break-ins of companies and organizations of all sizes. In fact, it seems like a steady stream of these news events almost every day. We hear about these things in the regular news because they have a clear, tangible effect on businesses, people and their customers. However, there are another whole class of major attacks that are taking place on a continual basis on the unseen loosely interwoven fabric of the internet away from the reporter's pen, the public's eyes and most everyone's awareness. These attacks are like parasites that you don't know are there but are continually leaching blood (information streams) and nutrients (data) from their hosts. These attacks only come to light when the parasitic hacker makes an error or intentionally disrupts a route to a website, an entire network or region of a country. You are probably thinking that these are isolated and rare, but they are not. There are over 10 thousands of attacks a year with some lasting a few seconds, to minutes, days or even 2.5 years in the longest documented case. These attacks range from routing redirections, where some or all traffic is accidentally (through human error) or intentionally misrouted from point A through point C to get to point B to outright disruptions. In the case of misrouting Point A and Point B can be in the same country and point C could be somewhere else in the world and most users would not know it because the internet links are so fast. This means that a hacker could misroute a specific bank, government agency or an entire country to another place so that the data could be intercepted, recorded and then analyzed later for various usually nefarious purposes. In fact, in 2017 large amounts of traffic belonging to Mastercard, Visa and many other financial services companies were rerouted to a Russian telecommunications company for unknown reasons. This happened again the same year with all traffic from Los Angeles to Washington DC being rerouted through China before it was sent to Washington DC. More recently in November of 2018, most of the traffic for Google.com was routed through China, Russia and Nigeria. This caused Google to appear to go down for over an hour. Some experts speculated that it might have been an actual war-gaming exercise to see if they could actually Michael MeyerTHE INTERNET FABRIC IS UNDER CONSTANT ATTACKBy Michael Meyer, CRO, CSO, MRS BPOCXO INSIGHTS
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