The Cyber Edge

Last year was a banner year for cyber fraud. In just the first six months of 2019, more than 3,800 breaches exposed 4.1 billion records, with 3.2 billion of those records exposed by just eight breaches. The scale of last year’s data breaches underscores the fact that identity has become the currency of the digital world and data is the fuel that powers the digital economy. What’s also clear looking back on 2019 is that digital identities are continually being compromised on multiple levels. 

Mobile technology is not always available to military or government personnel in all environments. Operating in a secure facility requires cellular phones or other mobile devices to be stowed outside the door. Companies are preparing solutions to enable the use of mobile devices in such accredited facilities in ways not seen before.

“The Defense Department deals with very sophisticated adversaries, and as a result, those devices are banned in many places and need to be controlled,” says Mike Fong, founder and CEO of Privoro.

The FBI is increasing its cooperative efforts with U.S. government agencies and overseas allies as it wages an unending battle against growing cyber adversaries with escalating capabilities. Joining four major nation-states on the cyber threat list are terrorists and criminal organizations that constitute a mounting threat to U.S. national security, including the economy. The FBI faces the challenge of keeping up with these enemies, while knowing that they are relentless in their pursuit of cyber supremacy to achieve their goals.

The rapid pace of technology adoption has leveled the playing field in global competition and opened new warfare domains in the space and cyber realms. To maintain their competitive advantage, U.S. warfighters must find ways to simplify and streamline technology upgrades and fixes in the field, as well as develop processes to onboard new technology solutions faster. Open architecture and modular systems present compelling solutions to achieve this goal.

Long before the federal government charged two defendants in 2018 for ransomware attacks on municipal computer systems—including Atlanta’s—cities found ways to make do during these outages. Police wrote reports by hand, traffic tickets were paid in person and social media kept everyone informed in a way that showcased a city’s resiliency.

Fiber is booming as telecommunications customers seek more services both in the cloud and at the network’s edge. The most important part of society’s information infrastructure, it is relatively secure in the face of attempts to wreak devastating harm to the nation, experts say. But that security is not absolute, and potential vulnerabilities could open up optical fiber to damaging attacks. Damage to this infrastructure, which serves as the backbone of the Internet and all the e-commerce that travels over it, could bring about an unprecedented economic upheaval.

Over the next year, U.S. government officials intend to develop an initial conformance framework to ultimately improve resilience for systems that provide positioning, navigation and timing for a wide variety of users. That initial framework will focus on timing, and lessons learned will be used to develop more comprehensive versions.

Monitoring global lightning strikes could help detect cyber attacks on the U.S. electrical grid, according to Georgia Institute of Technology researchers who have a patent pending to do just that.

Lightning strikes roughly 3.5 million times per day on average. Each and every strike creates an electrical path miles tall that emits a very low frequency radio signal. Those signals bounce off the upper atmosphere and can be detected virtually anywhere in the world, explains Morris Cohen, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Cloud Based Internet Isolation prototyping effort is already eliminating cyber threats every day, says Angela Landress, who manages the program commonly known as CBII.

The program uses a little technological sleight of hand to keep non-secure Internet browsing in the secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud rather than on the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN). “What comes back from the cloud is actually just a video-like representation of the webpage. There’s nothing executable in it,” Landress explains.