The 12th instalment in the series designed for military and national security decision makers focuses on a global ransomware attack against Coop, one of the major supermarket chains in Sweden, through software from Kaseya, The Pegasus spyware controversy, which revealed the extent to which controversial spyware technologies are being used to digitally surveillance targets across the globe, Cyberattack against South African ports, North Korea hacking South Korea’s Nuclear Institute and Aerospace Company and Reactions to China’s compromise of Microsoft Exchange.
One of the authors Jan Wünsche, CCDCOE Strategy Researcher, explains that the past year the number of large cyber incidents have been increasing. “Reading the news of the attacks targeting US, and the US attribution of many of these to Russia or criminal gangs in Russia, may give you the impression that this is something that mainly goes on in those countries,” he said.
“The incidents that we describe in the latest issue of Recent Cyber Events show that this is not the case,” Wünsche added. He explained that the threat is truly global, both when it comes to the actors behind the threat and their targets.
According to Wünsche in this issue is described how ransomware attacks hit grocery stores in Sweden in the north to ports in South Africa in the south and how cyber espionage is an issue from South Korea in the east to the US in the west. “Another aspect of the global threat is the spread of hacking tools, with the discoveries of how the spyware Pegasus has been used to target journalists, and human rights defenders as a recent example,” he added.
In 2020 the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) launched a series of reports that highlight how threats, vulnerabilities and incidents in cyberspace can affect military organisations and their operations.
The primary audience for this series includes military decision makers at different levels of command. The selection of relevant news articles stems from the significance of the events from the perspective of the military, utilizing the CCDCOE´s multidisciplinary expertise and 360° approach to cyber defence.