Offensive weapons (virusses/worms/hackers)

Description

People will always find new ways to exploit certain systems. The current technological weapons are:

- Distrubuted Denial of Service Attacks
- Virusses
- Trojan Horses
- Malware
- Exploits

These weapons can be used to obtain access to or information from computer systems and are used often.

Enablers

Development of Computer Science
Computer Science has been developing at a very fast pace. New products, technology and research drive the market. Thanks to new technology like evolutionary algorithms, faster networks and machines worms and viruses can spread more quickly and are harder to discover.

Expansion of the internet
The on-going expansion of the internet provides scalability opportunities and connectivity. More and more specific systems can be targeted and one destructive virus could potentially hurt millions of computer systems.

Carelessness and unawareness of computer-users
Because most of the people are not fully aware of the cyber threats and are not capable to secure their systems hackers profit from this. Through social engineering they can obtain access to systems and information. It’s often said that humans are the weakest link in security.

Software flaws
Hackers constantly find new ways to exploit software. These exploits can be a threat to companies and people and give the opportunity to gain an advantage in case of a cyber war. The defensive mechanisms have to play catch up to the new exploits that are found daily.

Inhabitors

Security systems
http://scenariothinking.org/wiki/index.php/Security_systems

Cyber laws
Cybercrime has been legislated as a crime by the The Convention on Cybercrime (2001), cyber warfare activities are similar to cyber terrorism, so the US Acts, for example, against terrorism can be applied. Because people can now be prosecuted for cyber war the barrier to use a cyber attack is higher.

Paradigms

Owners of botnets recieve money to send spam and DDoS targets. It's getting more organized and commercial. Countries are setting up cyber war departments and are more aware of the possibilities of cyber attacks.

Web Resources

http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2008/02/botnet-busted.html http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2191082/claims-russia-hired-botnets