
By Byron V. Acohido
One profound consequence of Donald Trump’s shutdown of the federal government, now in day 33, is what a boon it is to US cyber adversaries. And moving forward, the long run ramifications are likely to be dire, indeed.
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With skeleton IT crews manning government networks, America’s adversaries — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and others in Eastern Europe and the Middle East — have seized the opportunity to dramatically step up both development and deployment of sophisticated cyberweapons targeting at federal systems, says Jeremy Samide, CEO of Stealthcare, supplier of a threat intelligence platform that tracks and predicts attack patterns.
For a full drill down on the stunning intelligence Samide shared with Last Watchdog, please listen to the accompanying podcast. In a nutshell, Trump’s government shutdown has lit a fire under nation-state backed cyber spies to accelerate the development and deployment of high-end cyberweapons designed to be slipped deep inside of hacked networks and stealthily exfiltrate sensitive data and/or remain at the ready to cripple control systems.
This spike in activity has been very methodical, Samide told Last Watchdog. Operatives are stepping up probes of vulnerable access points on the assumption that no one is guarding the playground, Samide says. At the same time, they are also accelerating development of the latest iterations of weaponry of the class of Eternal Blue, the NSA’s top-shelf cyberweapon that was stolen, leaked and subsequently used to launch the highly invasive WannaCry and NotPetya worms.
The longer the Trump government shut down continues, the more time US cyber adversaries will have to design and deploy heavily-cloaked malware — and embed this digital weaponry far and wide in federal business networks and in critical infrastructure systems, Samide says.
What’s more, the longer the government closure continues, the more likely it is that key IT staffers with cybersecuritiy experience will choose to move to the private sector where there is an acute skills shortage. …more