With 120 countries now in the cyber arms race, intelligence agencies around the world are working to assess their offensive and defensive cyber capabilities. Developing cyber weapons does not require the massive infrastructure usually associated with conventional arms. A couple of PCs and a couple of smart programmers and you have all you need to create a cyber weapon.
Advanced Data Weapons have unique capabilities that make their detection and elimination much more difficult than conventional viruses and trojans.
Self morphing malicious code applications
Electronic circuitry destruction capabilities
Self encrypting / decrypting of malicious code
External disruption capacity of wireless networks
Exploitation of unreported vulnerabilities in common commmercial software
Working with Intelomics and Spy-Ops, two international cyber security companies, we were able to collect enough data to construct the high level cyber threat matrix featured above.
As with the conventional arms race, countries with significant defense spending have taken the lead in the cyber arms race. But that trend is rapidly changing. In the past few years malicious code with advanced features has been created for under $3,500 USD. We are beginning to see the emergence of cyber arms dealers. The cost of cyber weapons are in range of poor and developing countries.
Question: who is more dangerous in the cyber weapons race nation states of a single rogue hacker?
