Page 77 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - September 2017

Nation State Threats

Each nation-state cyber threat actor has its own goals and reasons for conducting cyber
attacks. Some state-sponsored actors concentrate their efforts on espionage, while others focus
on warfare-type operations. While these types of actors rarely turn their attention to generating
money, they are nonetheless well-funded, typically through consistent money streams from their
respective governments.

Since at least 2001, China has focused almost exclusively on espionage-driven cyber attacks.
Their goal has been to steal key intelligence information and intellectual property secrets in the
hopes of replicating, or even surpassing, America’s innovative edge. Chinese cyber attacks
have been so successful in the intellectual property area that some Chinese manufacturers can
actually build an American company's product during the day—and then at night change the
same assembly line to print a Chinese company's logo on the product.

In other cases, Chinese-affiliated cyber actors infiltrate major global corporations to gain insight
into mergers and acquisitions. In these cases, Chinese companies are usually seeking an edge
in order to outbid the U.S. or another western company. They accomplish this by understanding
the bottom line prior to commencement of formal negotiations.

In 2014, Russia established a goal of resurrecting the might of the former USSR. To this end,
the country has greatly expanded its cyber operations over the last three years in a multi-
pronged approach. This comprises not only espionage operations, but information warfare as
well. Demonstrated tellingly during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, Russia’s information warfare
capability was extremely successful, using asymmetric operations involving proxy organizations
such as Wikileaks. The Russians managed to hack countless Republican and Democratic-
based political organizations with little effort and to damage those they were most interested in.

Attackers Work More Methodically Than First Thought

Today’s attackers have formerly unsuspected commonalities, actually operating in a unified,
professionalized, and sophisticated manner when conducting cyber attacks. We like to think of
attackers as a disjointed set of individuals loosely collaborating—when in fact they often work
more as an assembly line; from a technical perspective, they are quite routine. Cyber actors rely
on operational efficiency, reusable modular toolkits, and infrastructure stability to attack a large
number of targets successfully.

77 Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2017 Edition
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