Defense & Intelligence Policy, Business and Technology

Avoiding Failure of Imagination in Cyber Conflicts

Nextgov: Cyber threats are not always made using the most innovative tools. Even very sophisticated advanced persistent threat groups with access to zero days, such as the Russian group APT28 behind the Democratic National Committee compromise and the Chinese group behind the Office of Personnel Management breach, mostly infiltrate their targets via simple spear-phishing and social-engineering techniques.

The recent distributed denial-of-service attack on Dyn DNS that destabilized and interrupted a portion of the internet in October 2016—brought about by a botnet comprised of internet of things-enabled devices—highlighted the nexus of longstanding, relatively unsophisticated threat vectors and emerging technologies.

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