Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cyberwarfare

Cyberwar is Reality World Must Fight: UN Official

GENEVA – The international community must wake up to the reality of cyberwar and strive to find ways to stem it, the head of the UN’s telecommunications agency said Monday.

“There is a cyberwar going on,” Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, said during a cybersecurity debate at the Geneva Press Club.

GENEVA – The international community must wake up to the reality of cyberwar and strive to find ways to stem it, the head of the UN’s telecommunications agency said Monday.

“There is a cyberwar going on,” Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, said during a cybersecurity debate at the Geneva Press Club.

“Just like a conventional war, there are no winners, only destruction,” he warned an audience of reporters, diplomats and technology experts.

While Toure declined to pin the blame on individual countries, such attacks have become common currency.

Russia was widely blamed for what has been dubbed the world’s first cyberwar, in 2007, when state and bank websites were blocked for days in Estonia, one of the world’s most wired nations and a member of NATO and the European Union.

Since then, attention has focussed on China for alleged state-run cyber attacks on targets in the United States and elsewhere.

In recent weeks, pro-regime Syrian hackers and North and South Korean online warriors have also made headlines.

In an increasingly connected and Internet-dependent world, cyber attacks by governments and criminal gangs alike have the potential to wreak havoc on everything from the financial sector to key public services, Toure said.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

That raises the spectre of huge economic losses and social chaos, and Toure said governments and business worldwide must think collectively about how to head that off.

“No one single entity can do it alone. We have to change the mindset. Are we mentally prepared to work with one another?” he asked.

“In this arena, there’s no such thing as a superpower anymore,” he said, given that is it cheap to create viruses and launch attacks.

“It’s the human brain that’s driving this. So we’re all equal in this, and we need to come together. That’s the new order. It’s not one country. It’s not like a nuclear power, where the technology, the knowledge base and the infrastructure and the funding are required for that.

“We have to treat cyberspace like we treat the real world,” he added. “What’s true in the real world is true in cyberspace. Some people say we’re in a new environment where the rules are completely different. We’re not. Because humans are at the centre of this.”

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON - Cyberattacks are the most serious threat facing the United States, even more so than terrorism, according to American defense experts. Almost half...

Cyberwarfare

Russian espionage group Nomadic Octopus infiltrated a Tajikistani telecoms provider to spy on 18 entities, including government officials and public service infrastructures.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Cyberwarfare

Several hacker groups have joined in on the Israel-Hamas war that started over the weekend after the militant group launched a major attack.

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Cyberwarfare

The war in Ukraine is the first major conflagration between two technologically advanced powers in the age of cyber. It prompts us to question...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Cybercrime

On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cybersecurity companies summarize the cyber operations they have seen and their impact.