Page 132 - Cyber Defense eMagazine June 2020 Edition

an option to destroy their equipment for a period of time. They would repair their resources and keep
attacking again and again. That could be quite unpleasant, could it not? In other words, always keep in
mind that some mommy with the baby would be stuck at her home while not getting important web
connectivity for her smart kitchen and her baby would undoubtedly be scared from not getting warm milk
for a dinner.

A similar scenario could happen in any office or factory if your IT infrastructure gets overwhelmed with
viruses, spyware, malware and advanced persistent threats. In these cases, you would definitely deal
with the business discontinuity and ineffectiveness, so your IT support team would need some time to fix
everything for you. If such a situation proceeds – the things could get a bit of annoying to everyone, of
course. The fact is you would not suffer the stressful condition if these situations were rare, but if it’s
happening day by day, week by week and if you are losing so confidential information frequently – you
would definitely get frustrated with your everyday routine for a reason the majority of your hard work
would just go to waste. So, you are losing your effort just in the middle of your business day and your
boss has required you to resolve your task by the end of that working week. Indeed, you are frustrated
and by the bad situation – you did not expect that cyber attack at that moment – so you did not cope with
your regular daily backup procedures and nothing has been saved for just in case.

The bad situation could be even worse if someone has compromised your IT system from the outside
and inexperienced IT security professional could blame you for dealing with the high risk cyberspace
content. You would try to explain what you have done and if the law enforcement cyber team is that naive
as well they could believe that you are the potential insider threat, so your firing would simply smile on
you. Being the insider threat is so criminal stuff and there could be a lot of those to explain to the Police
officers. Well, if you put all these into account – you would get that any cyber operation with the possible
complications at work could cause real drama and trauma in your everyday life. So many people getting
the skill to obtain something on the computer with internet connectivity could just get less productive and
somehow paralyzed if they try to imagine what can happen if anyone seeks from them any sort of answers
getting provided to the critical questions. If anyone would report about you as the possible trouble maker
at least you would get suspended from your work waiting for the justice to come. The people would make
the mistakes and anything that can go wrong will go wrong, so for such a reason it’s not surprising at all
that you can feel a sense of fear, doubts and pessimism waiting for the IT security team and authorities
to estimate what happened within the entire network.

On the other hand, if your IP address is not compromised you can expect that someone could play with
your network traffic and shut down your business for the several working shifts. Losing the information
and especially the time is like a losing the money and so many businesses would simply collapse in front
of so untactful hackers and terrorists. As it is so well-known, the cyber crime would cost the global
economy a lot and no one would get avoided, so far. Well, that’s why we say it’s so significant to put your
accent on the background of the cyber campaigns for a reason the masterminds of those actions would
see the much bigger picture and carefully choose the time and moment to accomplish what they want to
obtain.

In this effort, we would go step by step through the main questions being so obvious here and we hope
our contribution would find some practical applications in the world of investigative procedures and

Cyber Defense eMagazine –June 2020 Edition 132
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