Cyber Attacks Use Some Spammers’ Techniques

Spammers use probability theory. There will be a certain number of people, per thousand number of spam sent, who will respond. With that premise, the more spam that a bot network can send out the more funds it will generate.

Cyber attackers seem to use the same paradigm. The number of attacks launched per month is staggering:

“… In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.“

link: Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets

The attacks only have to find the occasional error. That person may be tired, careless, distracted or not focused on security. The attack does not have to be successful at a high level of the infrastructure. Gaining access is the key factor. And, as repeated security breaches in the private sector and within government have demonstrated, the data that can be harvested most likely will not be encrypted.

One of the fundamental theories of the internet has been that, if there was a disruption caused by disaster, the world wide web would be able to maintain communication by “routing around” that calamity. It is subject to debate how destructive a highly planned attack could be to disrupt the internet.

Hopefully, the theory will not be tested by practical application.

Catherine Forsythe