Category: Internet

Cyber age has begun in the previous century and includes everything related to the web, computers and mobile technologies. As cyberspace has been developing, some security concerns have appeared. The future of computing technologies is clear – we are going quantum. But, how would be the future of cyber defence? Let’s say, we will get all those ultra fast, quantum-based computers in the coming decades, but how would we make them be a secure place for us? There is a lot of theories, but we will present you only some of them. So, let’s start our overview.

Whatever Your Cyber Defence is, Make it a Good One

Today’s cyber environment is very often harmful due to a lot of threats, risks and attacks that may occur there. What we have in mind first, when we say a cyber threat, are some sorts of criminal and terrorist groups. All they normally communicate with each other through the web. But, what is quite interesting, it’s pretty difficult to break into their communication. Why is that a case?

The answer to this question is so simple. They use a Darknet or a Deep Web to share the information, ideas and content with each other. So, what would be a Deep Web? The Deep Web is the part of the Internet that is usually invisible for regular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and so on. These search tools simply cannot index those fragments of cyberspace. That means all the communications, sharing and activities stay undetected using a normal mean of communication break ins. Luckily, there are special tools that may allow you to see what is going on under the surface. That’s what the law enforcement institutions use nowadays to gather evidence regarding these sorts of crime.

A good defence usually include a good understanding of threats. For that reason, it is vitally important to gather as much information as you can about your harmful opponent and to understand those information at both – tactical and strategic level. An appropriate tactic normally involve identifying and linking the actors of the criminal situation, while a strategy goes below the surface and must see a background of such a situation. Only with both components included, your defence can be a good one.

Do not Forget to be Aware of a Situation

A good problem management requires a good understanding of a situation that happens. Many researchers believe that a situational awareness is the art we need so much in security nowadays. The situational awareness has 3 phases in its data gathering and analysis process. These are (1) perception, (2) interpretation and (3) prediction. Let us explain these better.

The first step in a situation awareness methodology is perception. This step includes identifying and gathering the information regarding a case that has been investigated. The accuracy of such a obtained information can seriously affect the next two steps. Sometimes it’s quite complicated and time consuming to gather precise information due to disturbing environmental conditions. For that reason, it’s very important to have experienced and trained people who would be capable to deal with these.

Once the information have been gathered, you should start with their analysis or interpretation. This phase require very skilled staffs who are able to see the meaning of and also the links between such a collected information.

Finally, the last step here would be a prediction. It’s a quite strategic part of the task and strongly depends on how successful the previous two steps have been resolved. The prediction allows us to see the causes and effects of the situation and also understand the trends that may occur in the future.

Quantum Computing Seeks Quantum Encryption

From today’s perspective, our future seems as very quantum. At the moment, many scientists in the world are trying to build up the first quantum computers ever. There are many theories and research that suggest it’s feasible to make such a great innovation.

So, if a quantum computing is getting our reality of at least something that will become a part of our lives in the coming decades, does that mean our security will also follow this trend and become quantum as well? Experts say – Yes! We will be able to do a very powerful encryption at quantum level. In other words, it will be possible to encrypt the smallest pieces of the particle. Sounds like we will be in position to encrypt a nature itself. Well, that’s exactly what the current stage of the human’s development suggests.

The Future Relies on Intelligence

In the previous articles here, we were discussing how the future of cyber security could look like. What we see as crucially important at this stage are intelligence led or intelligence driven systems. Many researchers predict that such an intelligence-based concept should find its place in a software engineering and computer science world. There are indications that a software of the future would be capable to provide an active self-defence. As it is known, a defence, in its essence, is about a risk management. So, it’s not that hard to imagine a cyber solution of the future which will rely on intelligence and be able to protect itself.

Reference:

[1] 2014 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA), The European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol, 2014

In a today’s world of constantly increasing cyber threats, we should try to figure out how to stay secure and protected. Cyber systems are not the places which bring you benefits only; they can also be the cause of a lot of concerns. A modern world became too sensitive on cyber threats, so what we need at the moment are good strategies and techniques on how to handle all that. A novel cyber security proposes three steps in a good cyber defence. They are prevention, monitoring and incident response. We plan to discuss all these in the coming lines. So, let’s begin!

Cyber Security – the Facts

A modern cyber security can be defined as a process of maintaining an acceptable level of cyber risk. So, security is about a risk management. It’s a never-ending process which requires you to invest new and new efforts in order to keep thing secure. Bad guys will always do bad things and good guys should find a way to respond to all of that. There are a lot of malicious persons in a cyber world – hackers, criminals, terrorist and security is the one which would be ahead of all in order to protect us from harm.

In a recent time, there are a lot of speculations in public on how potential cyber threats could affect us. There are more than 2 billions internet users in the world and from that point of view things are getting quite complicated. In the reality, everything based on emerging technologies can be affected – beginning from your PC, over electricity network, until satellite communications.

For such a reason, a good defence is something that we vitally need. That defence must be capable to put threats under control. It’s a hard task; it requires an investment of a lot of efforts, but it’s the only one that can offer as a long-term solution to the problem. It’s like putting things into order within some disordered environment. An entropy is something that exponentionally increases in this Universe, so we are supposed to work hard to make some parts of our reality organised. The same analogy can be done with a cyber environment. If we let a cyber system deal on its own, it will get disordered and insecure.

Why are Things Getting too Critical?

There is an infrastructure that is especially sensitive to threat. We call such an infrastructure the critical or the vital one. If anything would happen to that infrastructure, that would be a harm to entire country or nation. Good examples of those are telecommunications systems, traffic infrastructure, data centres, electricity systems and so on. The problem with such systems is they are so important for a normal everyday life of some place. The threat to that infrastructure could affect lives of many people.

In that sense, it is crucially significant to understand the threat in order to get protected from it. There are a lot of techniques and methods to get familiar with the issue. Modern security systems are mostly intelligence-driven, which means operations are well-prepared, information are well-analysed and strategies are well-developed. Things can appear as too critical at the beginning as there is not enough information provided, but as we are getting a better understanding of threat, our defence is getting clearer.

The Protection Scenarios

As mentioned above, there are three protection scenarios used nowadays. These are (1) prevention, (2) monitoring and (3) incident-response. A prevention is about avoiding bad things to happen to your system. On the other hand, a monitoring includes following and analysing what goes on within your environment, while an incident-response is the most complicated step and means how good you will react to protect your system as it is under attack.

Only a cyber system with all three activities combined can say for itself it is secure enough. The majority of current cyber environments follow this pattern.

Few Words at the End

As threats in our world are developing, security systems are progressing and getting better and smarter. The task of a good security is to always stay ahead a threat. This can seem as challenging through some phases of defence, but, at the end, good guys beat bad guys.

Reference:

[1] Scott Charney, Rethinking the Cyber Threat: A Framework and Path Forward, Microsoft, 2009

In the era of the Internet and emerging technologies, we are supposed to deal with different sorts of cyber threats, risks and attacks. This modern time brought a lot of advantages to the Human Kind, but also some fast-spreading and increasing security issues. It seems we are connected with the risk more than ever before. Cyber environment may appear as so friendly and convenient, but for real it brings a lot of nightmares to its visitors. In this article, we discuss all the disadvantaging things you can face up in cyberspace and also suggest why cyber security and a good undersigning of the problem is so important for a good defence. So, let’s start.

What is Cyber Security?

In the ancient China, there was the belief that our world had been governed by two opposite forces. Yin and Yang. The force of the offence and the force of the defence. It has been believed that world could be in harmony only if those two forces are in balance.

Similarly, a modern experts see security as a balance between attack and defence. Cyber security is also about balance, but in cyber means. Sometime it may happen that a cyber system loses its balance. Some of the forces – either attack or defence can make advantage. In such a case, it is crucially important for a system to return its balance. That ability to return lost balance is called stability. This claim also has its origins in mathematics and can be proved through precise equations.

So, what would be the point of cyber? How can we define that term? Cyber is everything about the web, mobile devices and computers. It’s quite commercial terms and means many different things to many different people. Basically, there is no universal definition of cyber. Very often, cyber security is named as cyber. Well, if we say cyber, we may mean cyber security by that. Quite exciting, is not it? Indeed. Let’s continue with our talk.

Cyber Threats – How Bad are They?

Some define cyber threat as a person or organization intending to cause harm at cyber level. It is usually believed that there can be a lot of cyber risks and attacks in cyberspace. The main risks that cyber community experience nowadays are (1) cyber crime, (2) cyber espionage, (3) cyber warfare and (4) activism. Further, we would try to illustrate and understand those sorts of threats.

Let’s start with cyber crime. What is it? Cyber crime is every sort of illegal activity obtained on computer or network which aim is to get money. At the beginning of cyber era, cyber crime was about breaking into someone’s computer, making changes into that system and leaving. Right now, it’s about the money. It’s about stealing credit cards, confidential information, passwords and so on in order to take advantage. Cyber crime commonly can be discovered using cyber forensics diagnostics.

On the other hand, cyber espionage is about information regarding someone’s activities which are gathered secretly through some sort of cyber devices. This sort of activity can have a different background and can be distinguished as economic and military. It’s obvious what would collecting of information in secret mean in terms of economic interest and what in terms of military goals.

The next term to get explained here would be cyber warfare. Sounds spectacular, but it’s not. It’s something that occurs in the world every single day. There are a lot of state and non-state programs which aim is to do sabotage or cause harm to computers or equipment of certain individuals or groups. Also, there are a lot of such malware like viruses or worms in the world which are created to prevent the state or organization from terrorism, organized crime, hackers, etc. The well-known advanced threat of today are those which cannot be detected easily. Some of the examples are Stuxnet, Flame, Shamoon, and so on.

Finally, we should say several words about activism. Activism is none of above. It’s also about computer breach, but with a goal to show that you are capable of doing that, to send some social or political message, to embarrass your target, etc. It’s about people who can do that and who will do that, just to show they can.

Cyber Metrics – How it Matters?

Cyber metrics can be defined as a set of measurements that can be applied in order to control, understand and, in terms of threat, defend your cyber system. It’s about finding a quantitative values of certain cyber parameters such as a number of infections, data breach rate, amount of viruses in the system and so on. Metrics can be expressed through numbers, percentages or averages.

Once all the quantities of cyber system are detected and measured, it is possible to analyse those data and to present them through graphs, statistics or models. Cyber metrics is a great stuff because it can support us in controlling, understanding and defending a cyber environment. It’s, basically, the key factor in defence.

In order to obtain a good cyber metrics, it is recommended to follow the best industrial practice which will support you in metrics and models preparation. For that purpose, the following steps could be applied: (1) defining the metrics program goals and objectives, (2) deciding which metrics to generate, (3) developing strategies for generating the metrics, (4) establishing benchmarks and targets and (5) determining how the metrics would be reported.

Finally, threat metrics is about measuring threat. As given before, threat is an individual or organization which intends to do harm. It seems a bit of hard to measure such an abstract term. Maybe we should have a closer look at what cyber threat is for real. Basically, it’s about a potential or possibility to some cyber harm to occur. So, throughout that perspective we should observe cyber threat metrics and its modelling.

Understanding and Defence – Why Can They Go Together?

At the end, we should explain clearly why understanding of the problem and defence can go together. Well, this is something that we can get intuitively, is not it? Better we understand the issue, threat, risk, better we will find a way to protect against it. It’s similar like a warfare. If you understand your enemy, you will have a better chance to defeat him. Additionally, understanding is only a key thing, but your capabilities, technology, ability to learn and adopt will decide how will win the war.

References:

[1] Mark Mateski, Cassandra M. Trevino, Cynthia K. Veitch, John Michalski, J. Mark Harris, Scott Maruoka, Jason Frye, Cyber Threat Metrics, Sandia National Laboratories, 2012
[2] Scott Charney, Rethinking the Cyber Threat: A Framework and Path Forward, Microsoft, 2009
[3] Shirley C. Payne, A Guide to Security Metrics, SANS Institute, 2007

As we live in the era of digital technologies, cybersecurity concerns are getting more and more frequent and serious. The Government agencies and other organisations need to protect their IT facilities while cybercrime severity increases. Similarly, as everywhere in the world, Australia is facing up these issues as well. The trend shows that the entire world including Australia is suffering cyber skills shortage.

Introduction

Cybercrime started off with geeky teenage computer experts hacking email accounts and bypassing basic access control mechanisms for IT networks. The industry has developed over the years, and many amateurs now practice basic hacking tactics in the cyber space. However, the IT security industry still faces a global skills gap that could take as much as twenty years to fill in some of the most developed countries of the world.

The Defence Science and Technology Organisation is looking for new recruits to Australia’s cyber army – a task that promises to be an uphill battle as Australia struggles to produce enough computer science engineers.

Cyber-army cuts 

Highly skilled computer science graduates are increasingly in demand in the private sector and many industry experts believe there are not enough cyber worriers popping out of the nation’s universities.

As it is known, having strong cyber security is critical to having a strong economy. It’s not something that should be outsourced.

In Australia, graduates were divided between IT support workers and network engineers, the latter of which are taught to build new network defence and critical enterprise systems which Australia lacks.

The National ICT Australia (NICTA) has warned that “Australia could miss the chance to build an internationally competitive cyber security industry if it doesn’t … create market opportunities and challenging careers for our best computer scientists and software engineers.”

Cyber wars coming up

By some experts, funding from priority areas such as cyber security would not be cut. But many scientists fear Australia’s investment into cyber security is leaving the nation vulnerable to unknown threats.

According to Tom Worthington from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, the next war that Australia is involved in will start in cyber space and we won’t realise we are under attack until we have real problems. Also it takes years to train people in cyber security.

There are some cyber schooling institutions such as the new ADFA “cyber range” training centre has begun educating Australian defence forces in network security but it is understood the new cyber security centre announced under the Gillard government is waiting to get opened.

Usually under attack

Recently a cyber strike brought down the Australian Federal Police website, part of a series of attacks on the organisation. The group believed to be responsible is also suspected of cyber attacks against the Royal Australian Air Force, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the spy agencies ASIO and ASIS.

The issue is that no countries invest enough in cyber security, which is a very important area, and that countries which do not invest enough are forced to rely on expertise of the major powers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as an example of a good industry practice we can mention that the Australian Government has teamed up with Telstra, NBN Co and PwC to hold the Cyber Security Challenge to address a skills shortage in the number of cyber security professionals in Australia. We hope these will somehow fill the existing gap.

Although cloud computing can help companies accomplish more by breaking the physical bonds between an IT infrastructure and its users, heightened security threats must be overcome in order to benefit fully from this new computing paradigm that offers an innovative business model for organizations to adopt IT without upfront investment. Despite the potential gains achieved from the cloud computing, the model security is still questionable which impacts the cloud model adoption. The security problem becomes more complicated under the cloud model as new dimensions have entered into the problem scope related to the model architecture, multi-tenancy, elasticity, and layers dependency stack.

1. Introduction

Cloud Computing is a jargon, in other words a new computing model, in which the public Internet is used to connect to provider’s hosted network, infrastructure, platform and/or applications to leverage reliable services. Cloud has left all other distributed computing structures/mechanisms far behind both in competition and in terms of popularity and success.

The primary reason is that, any service can be scaled up or down as and when required, based on customer’s needs. Cloud offers flexibility, quick to production model, and offers capital reduction by enabling organizations to port all their data, information and infrastructure to off-site provider hosted premises.

Cloud Computing is essentially a combination of existing technologies that are succeeding in make a paradigm shift in building and maintaining distributed computing systems making use of, multiprocessor, virtualization technology, network based distributed data storage and networking. The cloud providers have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) and many more services to offer.

2. Cloud Computing Security Problems

The cloud system is running in the internet and the security problems in the internet also can be found in the cloud system. The cloud system is not different the traditional system in the PC and it can meet other special and new security problems.

The biggest concerns about cloud computing are security and privacy. The traditional security problems such as security vulnerabilities, virus and hack attack can also make threats to the cloud system and can lead more serious results because of property of cloud computing. Hackers and malicious intruder may hack into cloud accounts and steal sensitive data stored in cloud systems. The data and business application are stored in the cloud center and the cloud system must protect the resource carefully.

Cloud computing is a technology evolution of the widespread adoption of virtualization, service oriented architecture and utility computing. over the Internet and it includes the applications, platform and services. If the systems meet the failure, fast recovery of the resource also is a problem. The cloud systems hide the details of service implementation technology and the management. The user can’t control the progress of deal with the data and the user can’t make sure the data security by themselves. The data resource storage and operation and network transform also deals with the cloud system. The key data resource and privacy data are very import for the user.

The cloud must provide data control system for the user. The data security audit also can be deployed in the cloud system. Data moving to any authorized place you need it, in a form that any authorized application can use it, by any authorized user, on any authorized device. Data integrity requires that only authorized users can change the data and confidentiality means that only authorized users can read data. Cloud computing should provide strong user access control to strengthen the licensing, certification, quarantine and other aspects of data management.

In the cloud computing, the cloud provider system has many users in a dynamic response to changing service needs. The users do not know what position the data and do not know which servers are processing the data. The user do not know what network are transmitting the data because the flexibility and scalability of cloud system. The user can’t make sure data privacy operated by the cloud in a confidential way. The cloud system can deploy the cloud center in different area and the data can be stored in different cloud node. The different area has different law so the security management can meet the law risk. Cloud computing service must be improved in legal protection.

3. Cloud Computing Approaches

To achieve efficient utilization of resources, cloud providers need to increase their resource utilization while decreasing cost. At the same time consumers need to use resources as far as needed while being able to increase or decrease resources consumption based on actual demands. The cloud computing model meets such needs via a win-win solution by delivering two key characteristics: mulit-tenancy and elasticity. Both characteristics tum out to have serious implications on the cloud model security.

Multi-tenancy implies sharing of computational resources, storage, services, and applications with other tenants. This sharing of resources violates the confidentiality of tenants’ IT assets which leads to the need for secure multi- tenancy. To deliver secure multitenancy there should be isolation among tenants’ data and location transparency where tenants have no knowledge or control over the specific location of their resources, to avoid planned attacks that attempt to co-locate with the victim assets. In IaaS, isolation should consider VMs’ storage, processing, memory, cache memories, and networks. In PaaS, isolation should cover isolatation among running services and APIs’ calls. In SaaS isolation should isolate among transactions carried out on the same instance by different tenants and tenants’ data.

Elasticity implies being able to scale up or down resources assigned to services based on the current demand. Scaling up and down of tenant’s resources gives the opportunity to other tenants to use the tenant previously assigned resources. This may lead to confidentiality issues.

For example, tenant A scaled down so it releases resources, these resources are now assigned to tenant B who in turn use it to deduce the previous contents of tenant A. Moreover, Elasticity includes a service placement engine that maintains a list of the available resources from the provider’s offered resources pool. This list is used to allocate resources to services. Such placement engines should incorporate cloud consumers’ security and legal requirements such as avoid placing competitors services on the same server, data location should be within the tenants’ country boundaries Placement engines may include a migration strategy where services are migrated from physical host to another or from cloud to another in order to meet demands and efficient utilization of the resources. This migration strategy should take into account the same security constraints. Furthermore, security requirements defined by service consumers should be migrated with the service and initiates a process to enforce security requirements on the new environment, as defmed by cloud consumers, and updates the current cloud security model.

4. Conclusion

Cloud computing has a very fast pace of development and shows good prospects and great potential. The cloud computing is related to many areas of information management and services. The data security issue becomes more prominent than the traditional network because the data in the cloud computing environment is greatly dependent on the network and server.

5. References:

[1] Akhil Behl, Emerging Security Challenges in Cloud Computing, 2011 World Congress on Information and Communication Technologies, 2011
[2] Anas BOUA Y AD, Asmae BLILA T, Nour el houda MEJHED, Mohammed EL GHAZI, Cloud computing : security challenges, IEEE, 2012
[3] Wentao Liu, Research on Cloud Computing Security Problem and Strategy, IEEE, 2012

When one considers the decision-making and planning necessary to conduct malicious cyber activity, it becomes easier to understand how it is not simply an “on-the-network