OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ) – Cyber attacks are fairly common, but with sanctions placed against Russia – it’s quite possible that the frequency of such things against certain industries could rise.
Listen to the full interview here:
There are tons of ways to protect yourself and your business from being impacted by a major cyber attack. And most of them aren’t very expensive to implement.
“Take it seriously. No business is too big, too small, too tied-in, too separated from anything else to be the target of a cyberattack, whether it be from a criminal or nation state,” said UW Oshkosh Cybersecurity Center of Excellence Director, Michael Patton. “We could probably surmise that Oshkosh Corporation is potentially the target of a nation state, where as, you know, Bob’s Trails End is probably not.”
Though they could, if they wanted to cut off people from legendary $2.25 hot dogs. That would be a travesty. Different actors have different motivations and different targets.
Patton says even small businesses and individuals who might not feel like they have anything to target could be hit hard. And in some cases, they’ll never even know.
“If you have a digital footprint – and my guess is that if you’re breathing, you have a digital footprint – you and whatever it is that you’re working with could be the target of a cyberattack,” Patton told WTAQ News. “They may not be interested in your data or your finances, but they may be interested in your technology. They could put a bot on your computer, on your server, and then use those bot to launch other attacks.”
That could make anyone an unwitting accomplice to a larger attack because you accidentally installed something on your computer – like a bot or data – that is used in that attack.
“The Internet’s a bad neighborhood. There are bad actors out there. We need to be aware of what’s going on – not scared, not paranoid, but aware – and know that our actions have consequences,” Patton said.
Even when it comes to those large, three-letter agencies, infiltration tends to happen when people aren’t careful or make a simple mistake, not when a hooded techie in the basement cracks an impressively encrypted server.
“No job within a business is exempt from having cyber security responsibilities…Most of those attacks are successful, not because of the things that we see in the movies, but through social engineering. I’m going to send you an email that purports to be a cute cat video and purports to come from your cousin,” Patton explained. “Maybe it takes you to a cat video, but maybe it also installs some software on your machine that has now let the bad guys into your network.”
Now, if Russian state-supported cyber attacks were targeting large companies in the U.S., we’d likely already know it’s coming.
“They could come after our power utility, they could come after our water. Basically anything connected to the Internet that that helps us be who we are is a target,” Patton said. “If those attacks are successful, that is a significant escalation in the threat, right? If that is ever successful to the degree where it’s causing major problems, we’ll probably in a ‘hot war’ anyway.”
Several attacks on water filtration facilities in states like Nebraska and Florida had hackers from places like Russia, China, and Iran caught red-handed.
To learn more about how to protect yourself from cyber attacks, head to the Wisconsin Cyber Threat Response Alliance website.
