According to The ABC, State-sponsored cyber operations have doubled in the last two years. This is a scary statistic, we hear about the next war being a cyber war and news reports of cyber attacks (in recent months we’ve had the Colonial Pipeline attack; the attack on Meat giant, JBS; the FireEye hacking and attacks on our own government, universities and hospitals). With such sensational and attention grabbing headlines, it can be easy to think things are getting worse, but facts are important for perspective. 

Checking the article’s source, The Council on Foreign Relations,  (https://www.cfr.org/cyber-operations/#Timeline) – I found that in 2016 there were 33 cyber attacks, in 2018 there were 80, not 55 as stated in the article. This may be a case of the data being amended after the article being published. This article is from 2019 and using data from 2016 to 2019, using the source we can see the trend is continuing, with 119 cyber attacks in 2020. 

 Source: Council on Foreign Relations  Get the data

Unfortunately – or fortunately depending on your point of view – state based cyber security incidents appear to be increasing. 

sources:

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) https://www.csis.org/programs/strategic-technologies-program/significant-cyber-incidents – appears to be a reputable NFP with donations from governments around the world, including Australia.

Florian Roth’s APT Groups and Operations spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H9_xaxQHpWaa4O_Son4Gx0YOIzlcBWMsdvePFX68EKU/pubhtml – Florian Roth is the CIO at SAP, is this really his spreadsheet? 

Kaspersky Lab’s Targeted Cyberattacks Logbook https://apt.securelist.com – trustworthy