Pop culture gives us an impression of what cyber investigations look like. Official-looking people, in impeccable suits, typing away at terminals and analyzing the data scrolling past them on their heads-up displays. In reality, computer forensics (as they are actually called) are a little less dramatic, and much more serious. For today’s tech term, we’ll dig into the field of computer forensics.
Every so often, it’s nice to hear about when the good guys win and cybercriminals get their comeuppance. Three such cybercriminals have entered guilty pleas to charges related to major cybersecurity events.
Do you know what a botnet is and how it works? It’s basically a network of infected computers that can be used to perform Distributed Denial of Service attacks, overloading target networks and forcing them to endure downtime. They can also be used to distribute malware and other threats. What’s worse than this, you ask? Hackers can purchase botnets on the black market to use against their targets, but a new type of botnet strain is changing the way this works.
In 2016 former President of the United States Barack Obama passed the Cybersecurity National Action Plan that implemented near-term action and developed a longer-term strategy of bringing awareness and protections to public computing systems connected to the Internet. The strategy is to make an immediate effort to empower citizens to protect their own privacy, while also maintaining public safety and national and economic security, as many of the most critical systems this nation utilizes are networked on the web.
When it comes to solving crime few are as well renowned as Sherlock Holmes. However, now Watson is stepping forward to strike back against cyber criminals--but not Dr. Watson, Holmes’ faithful companion. Instead, we’re referring to Watson, IBM’s renowned supercomputer.
It’s clear that security professionals have waged war with hackers since the Internet’s inception, but NATO has reaffirmed that cybersecurity is not just a localized problem; it’s a nation-state-wide issue, and one that needs to be addressed. Just like land, air, and sea, cyberspace is now an operational domain, a place that can be considered a battlefield.
