Interviews

Cyber attack book

by Mark Rowe

Mark Osborne, Executive Director at Digital Assurance and previously CISO at Interoute, has launched his latest book ‘Cyber Attack – Cyber Crime – Cyber Warfare – Cyber Complacency: Is Hollywood’s blueprint for Chaos coming true?’ on Amazon.

The book looks at cyber attacks in popular movies and contrasts these with real threats to the internet. The book tackles the privacy/protection debate and the need for state intervention (made topical recently by the Prism revelations) before going on to explore the technical ease with which communication networks can be hijacked and the potential for a communications ‘firesale’.

‘Cyber Attack – Cyber Crime – Cyber Warfare – Cyber Complacency’ is in three parts, with each chapter introduced by a quote from a well-known movie cyber attack. Part one addresses the economics of cyberspace and the Internet and why the environment is vulnerable, with Osborne exploring monitoring techniques and why, he says, they are insufficient to protect us in an internet-dependent world.

Part two looks at the mechanics of a BotNet and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and our over-reliance on what he claims are inadequate security techniques. Part three provides an almanac of attacks before dissecting the top six threats: physical security; Border Gateway Protocol (BGP); Domain Name Servers (DNS); Software; IPV6; and, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA).

In conclusion, Osborne explores the potential for a full scale ‘firesale’ as portrayed in Die Hard 4.0 in which a variety of techniques are used to orchestrate the collapse of critical power and utility networks.

Chapters are:

· Chapter One – Introduction
Looks at the lack of cybersecurity – what is Cyber?
· Chapter Two – Cyberspace as a business
Outlines the economics of cyberspace. It describes how Network providers and ISPs grow, charge and interact commercially. These lead to the under lying weakness in the structure
· Chapter Three – Look who’s monitoring
Examines the current Government initiatives and the “Privacy V’s Safety” dilemma. It explores this “Either/Or?” dichotomy and concludes that currently it is “Neither/Nor so None!”
· Chapter Four – How the Internet is monitored.
Describes the current tools and techniques.
· Chapter Five – The hardware needed for Cybersecurity probes
Explores monitoring and cooperative processing methods.
· Chapter Six – Software architecture for Cybersecurity probes
· Chapter Seven – Types of Denial of Service (DoS) attack
Explains the evolutionary path to the current DDoS and BotNets attacks.
· Chapter Eight – DDoS detection
Describes attack detection methods and modeling. Estimating the direct cost, indirect cost, and Customer churn – based on customer relationship type.
· Chapter Nine – DDoS mitigation
Outlines prevention, reactions and remediation.
· Chapter Ten – Cyber attack case studies
Provides real-life examples spanning the last ten years.
· Chapter Eleven – How can cyber space be vulnerable?
Physical, Mobile Apps, BGP, DNS, Software security, and SCADA vulnerabilities.
· Chapter Twelve – The Firesale: Hollywood’s blueprint for Armageddon
Examines how realistic the Die Hard 4.0 scenario now is.

Mark Osborne says: “I wanted to use Hollywood plots to highlight the inadequacies of our defenses against numerous attacks that are never discussed but are easy to execute and devastatingly effective. We’re living in an age of complicit cyber complacency in which we are all ignoring the elephant in the room. There simply isn’t enough technical monitoring of cyber space to protect us against cyber crime and cyber terrorism. This will never be remedied by the ‘100 geeks with laptops in a room’ panacea being proposed by the powers-that-be – that cannot be an effective strategy in the long term. I don’t want to give people more to worry about, just suggest that they should be more worried by this imminent threat.”

Details

TITLE: ‘Cyber Attack – Cyber Crime – Cyber Warfare – Cyber Complacency:
Is Hollywood’s blueprint for Chaos coming true?’
ISBN-13: 978-1493581283
ISBN-10: 1493581287
PAGE COUNT: 304
AVAILABLE FROM: Amazon.co.uk

About the author

Osborne previously wrote “How To Cheat at Managing Information Security” . Having formed and run the modern KPMG security practice, as well as holding positions with many technology firms like Hewlett Packard, Interoute and T-Systems, he is Executive Director at independent security consultancy, Digital Assurance (www.digitalassurance.com).

Related News

  • Interviews

    Spam latest

    by Mark Rowe

    Cybercriminals involved in spam distribution tried to capitalise on public fears when the WannaCry ransomware epidemic struck in May, according to IT…

  • Interviews

    Data Privacy Day

    by Mark Rowe

    Ahead of Data Privacy Day, on January 28, here are some comments from industry. Chris Vaughan VP – Technical Account Management, EMEA…

Newsletter

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay on top of security news and events.

© 2024 Professional Security Magazine. All rights reserved.

Website by MSEC Marketing