Cybersecurity Group Project 1

I am gonna kill all of you with my fucking shotgun

Introduction

This article provides valuable insight on the future of cybersecurity. Specifically, it gave a complete analyze about the current trends regarding cybersecurity issues: ８types of cybersecurity threats that are becoming more relevant to the current status of the world, how the related personnels can take steps to defend their systems against those attacks, and how to mitigate the damage caused by those attacks if they unfortunately did happen.

It mainly targeted at federal institutions like Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), but in my personal opinion, most of them are widely applicable to all the businesses and institutions that are vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Summary

The main part of this report is well-structured into 8 parts. Each part gave a crisp and concise explanation about one in eight of those specific cybersecurity threats. Some of the key points include:

• Cybersecurity Skills Gap: There is a increasingly wide skill gap between the SOTA cyberattack tecniques and the knowledge that cybersecurity professionals currently have. The main point here is that those attacks are becoming increasingly complex, and it’s getting increasingly hard to fully make sense of them. Methods to deal with them includes increasing training, upskill & reskill current taskforce, and build talent pool.
• Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk: 3rd party softwares might present the businesses / institutions that are using them with unexpected vulnerabilities. They are the primary target of attackers, and they can easily exploit them. Notorious examples include SolarWinds code compromise and Apache Log4j vulnerability.
• The Importance of Trustworthy Data: This highlighted the source of cybersecurity from a more fundamental level. The data being used by all the complex systems itself can be the weakness.
• API Attacks: APIs are vital connectors in the digital ecosystem, which made them very attrative targets for cybercriminals. And yet, there is increasing negligence about API portals because of the presence of legacy systems. To address this issue, the report mainly recommends a “zero trust” strategy.
• Living Off the Land: This type of threat mainly involves the existing credentials that are compromised, which can enable attackers to gain high authentication status and access sensitive data. The report said tht maintaining an improved host-level visibility and endpoint detection is key to solving this issue.
• Weaponizing GAI: The threat that GAI poses to cybersecurity is not a new concept, but this report put great focus on its threat on phishing attacks. GAIs can generate highly confusing contents for humans to tell between real and fake, which might greatly impact public opinion and undermine trust to the business/institution.
• Analysis: Critique the strengths and weaknesses of the material 

Analysis

This report is well-organized and is perfectly clear about the future cybersecurity threats, possibly because its target audience is federal service departments. However, some weaknesses do exist in this report, and there are some critical points that was not mentioned:

• Some attacks might originate from internal sources, or put it simply, there might be spies. This is definitely the case for government related services, but this might also be the case for businesses. Accesses to highly sensitive operational data should not be granted for thsoe who just switched job from a competitor’s company without a thorough review of the interests involved in their career.
• This report is definitely not an exhaustive list of all future trends, especially for attacking techniques regarding AI. AI is one of the fastest developing industries in current years, and new technologies might pop up any time. With new AI technologies, comes new cybersecurity threats.

Applications

The importance of trustworthy data is a new concept to me, because it is often an aspect that is being ignored. We often just use the data we are given without judging anything about its sources, and this report highlighted that those sources might just be the ground zero of a massive cyberattack plot. Also, the application of GAI is worth concerning. More and more people are becoming aware of GAIs, and not all of them are having good intentions while using those models. There are definitely people who will misuse them and wreck havoc, whenever then can.

Discussion questions:

• Do you think cybersecurity challenges presented for federal services are also applicable for “civilian” businesses/institutions? Why or why not?
• What other threats do you think GAI can present to cybersecurity, apart from the points mentioned in the report?
• As individuals, what do you think we can do to prevent our sensitive data from being exploited by criminals using those methods mentioned in the report?