For example, a firm like FireEye is an inherently bad target for a criminal attacker. The sheer amount of effort to infiltrate one of the Sunburst victim firms is also a telling sign that this was not a mere criminal hack. They also steal intellectual property – especially intellectual property that is expensive to develop in fields like high technology, medicine, defense and agriculture. They look for long-term access to critical infrastructure, gather intelligence and develop the means to disable certain industries. Hackers associated with national governments, on the other hand, have entirely different motives. Medical systems tend to use specialty medical devices that run older, vulnerable software that is difficult to upgrade. University networks are notoriously decentralized, difficult to secure, and often underfund cybersecurity. The hackers typically target organizations with weaker security, like health care systems, universities and municipal governments. They use techniques like ransomware to extort money from their victims, steal financial information, and harvest computing resources for activities like sending spam emails or mining for cryptocurrency.Ĭriminal hackers exploit well-known security vulnerabilities that, had the victims been more thorough in their security, could have been prevented. ![]() This was almost certainly the work of a nation – not criminalsĬriminal hackers focus on near-term financial gain.
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