Roman Cupka

In the coming years we can expect an even larger and more sophisticated wave of theft, fraud, extortion and deactivation of the various services run by businesses and public organisations. Here are a few reasons cybercrime will flourish in the coming years.

Last year completely refuted doubts about the increasing cyber security risks. Hackers, obtained sensitive data on hundreds of German politicians, including Chancellor Merkel and accessed data relating to tens of millions of Facebook accounts. The year also confirmed that hacking has become a means for political activists and an effective tool for professional criminals who have discovered a lucrative opportunity on the internet. What conclusions can we draw from these events for 2019?

Earlier this year, news was reported about Slovak Telecom secretly injecting a crypto-mining script into a website that users accessed. This was all done, apparently, without the consent of Slovak Telecom - a member of Deutsche Telekom – users. Specifically, the mobile TV Magio Go website was used, running a script that resulted in maximum processor overload due to Monero crypto-mining.

In the past years illegal activities have been moving more and more into the virtual world. Many types of cyber-attacks are now also able to be used in specific “business” activities.

Security in the SCADA/ICS environment is a much discussed topic today. In the past these systems were strictly separated. But their connection to common computer networks has opened new opportunities for attackers. How the network visibility combined with real-time anomaly detection helps to protect SCADA/ICS environments?

In February last year, one of the leading internet service providers in Slovakia suffered from the largest DDoS attack in the history of the country. The total volume of the attack exceeded 400 Gbps. Servers of its customers were down for tens of minutes… and not only the targeted ones. The attack wasn’t identified by automated tools and few hours passed from its start to successful resolution of the situation and restoration of the services.