IN THE DIGITAL AGE WE SPEND A SIGNIFICANT PART OF OUR LIFE IN CYBERSPACE
WE SHOP ONLINE
MAKE FRIENDS ONLINE
WORK AND RELAX ONLINE
DO WE REALISE THAT THE NET IS JUST AS DANGEROUS AS THE REAL WORLD?
DO WE REALISE THAT THERE ARE THREATS THAT NEITEHR WE,
NOR THE STATE CAN COUNTER?
[ Sam Soichet, Emerging Markets Managing Director, EEC services ] We are empowering ourselves to be more efficient.
We are quicker with our transactions, how we can
make mobile payments from our phones.
We can tell “Alexa” to open up our garage door…
All these things come with it – a lot of efficiency and a lot of benefits.
But with that comes a trade-off – which is there is more cybersecurity risk.
An extraordinary amount of paranoia.
The truth is that every device is a potential entry point
for a security attack.
[ Aleksandr Simonyan, Digital Forensics Expert, Group-IB ] Take any person today, and you'll be able to
find out everything about them in their phones
Their whole life will be in this small device:
preferences, social circle, contacts, correspondence…
People click on some links, the device gets infected,
and attackers gain access to the phone
And they can do absolutely anything: access the camera, correspondence, photos, etc.
Most people whose devices get infected through malicious links
don't know hackers are already in their phone, remotely monitoring it
[ Svetlana Ostrovskaya, Digital Forensics Coach, Group-IB ] A kind of paranoia sets in:
you tape over your web camera, change your passwords daily, switch off your microphone…
Everything's scary
There are also people who are indifferent
'Why do I need two-factor authentication? Who needs my 15 Instagram followers?'
But in fact, everything is useful for them,
and they'll hack an account with 15 followers
if they can use it as a verified account to place advertisements
Or they can place a notice containing bank card details
asking for help after a relative's death
Hackers will always find a way to use it, so you can't take it lightly
[ Soichet ] There are some fundamental rules around password management,
making sure that it is complex enough and has the right number,
right length, the right number of symbols,
or special upper-lower case, that everything.
That’s stuff that we are all familiar with.
Why you wanna be careful, when we are storing it all in one location is because
we are granting a single point of entry to obtain that data.
When you share a password,
which is very common among users – the same password for 20 different applications,
you hack one – you hack all of them.
[ Dmitry Gadar, Head, Information Security Department, Tinkoff bank ] This means if an online store where you used that password is compromised,
all your other accounts with this password will be compromised as well
The service is compromised, and your password ends up in global databases
The best thing to do is use two-factor authentication on all your services
For example, an SMS confirmation will be required when logging into your email
If you go to spycloud or haveibeenpwned and enter your account name
you'll be shocked by how many places your login and password have been leaked from
The databases are placed on the darknet and
sold for use in social engineering or phishing
Various companies buy these databases
[ Gleb Mikheev, CTO, Beta Digital Production ] If I steal a password
from some website with funny stories, it will do me no good
But if I snatch a FB password, I can spin it
If I steal a VKontakte password, I can scam people on VK
and profit from it as a malicious user
All it takes is some harmless action – to open an archive or run an exe file
Or, for example, if you try to download a Photoshop crack, that's a minefield
A hacker can throw in his own malicious software and access all your files,
the execution environment in which your sites run in the browser,
your web camera
They can mine bitcoins on your computer,
wasting electricity and overheating your device
They have full control, and you must decide what to do
[ Soichet ] It’s a dilemma of current age people who have a false sense of security.
While nothing happens, we have this false sense of security
that we are not going to be touched, it’s not going to affect us.
But at the end of the day it is very prevalent and it is out there:
you may not be primary focus right now,
but as soon as you become a profile target,
then you’re going to be the one who’s going to missing some money
in your account, and you’ll be frustrated for it.
[ Mikheev ] Everyone knows basic hygiene rules:
wash your hands, brush your teeth, bathe…
There's basic digital hygiene rules too:
use a strong unique password for each account
If a stranger wants you to do something odd, ask yourself: Why?
Don't open dodgy files or run pirate software
This is all digital hygiene
They should've begun teaching this in schools long ago, it's a no-brainer
Kids nowadays live in a digital world
It starts with surfing YouTube videos at the age of 2 and gets worse from there
All your social networks, services, phone and bank card numbers combine to form
a full-fledged digital identity, which you can simply lose
[ Hadi Hosn, CEO, Axon Technologies ] You’d be surprised: nowadays
the amount of information that exists about individuals –
on their phones, through their emails, through their corporate systems -
is generated at a scale that is like no other before.
From location data on your phone
to all your personal information that you have, whether it’s your
banking information, whether it’s your personal location and
information about where you live, where your kids go to school…
All of that information is available, and it’s on your either social media pages
or on your phone physically.
The big impact and risk on individuals from a database leak
is identity theft.
If someone has your name,
your address, your date of birth,
your email address, potentially also the password
that you use to access that specific website,
they have digital footprint.
They have your digital footprint and they also have your physical footprint
as they know a lot more about you based on that leak.
They can use that information
to provide or at least start to create an identity theft
as type of exercise, they can maybe go to a bank pretending to be you,
take loans in your name, take credit in your name.
When they access your email through phishing attacks,
they can then use your identity within your organization
to reach out to other systems within your organization that might store
either personal information of customers,
or may be some secret intellectual property
that only your organization has.
For example, the design for the next car
if you are a car manufacturer,
or the design for the next iPhone,
if you are “Apple” –
or some other organizations that are creating innovative products.
Those exist in systems,
and hackers and attackers are always trying
to gain the upper hand and competitive advantage
by reaching those systems and may be selling or providing it to competitors.
[ Hosn ] So there has been a lot of progress from the hacker side –
a lot more progress, actually, on the hacking side,
using AI, using other advanced technologies, -
than it has been on the defensive side.
The defenders have always been one step behind the attackers and some of those
technology developments,
because there is more collaboration and more sharing of
information in the hacking ‘eco-system’, if you like.
So you need to be aware that it could happen to you.
It could happen to you,
and for us, for the cybersecurity industry, we say that it’s not a matter of
if it happens – it’s a matter of when.
If you start changing your culture to become more aware of that,
then you’ll start applying some security into your ‘day-to-day’.
For example, you’ll have stronger passwords,
you’ll do 2-factor authentication when you’re trying to access some of those websites.
You might not leave you laptop on
and unlocked when you are in a coffee shop,
if you go to the toilet or you go to order something.
All of those things you need to start putting into your life –
as part of that secure lifestyle.
[ Gadar ] 2008 saw a significant change in cybercrime
facilitated by the development of the Internet
This is when an economic model emerged for
cybercrime that wasn't aimed at state targets
or stealing government secrets,
but purely on obtaining financial profit
Many think of hackers as bespectacled guys who launch attacks on their own
by quickly typing out green text on a black screen that turns things on and off
That's a myth
Attackers mostly don't act alone
It's a group effort: one writes malicious code,
one works on penetration, one tries to withdraw money
Members of these groups are often located in various places, like in big IT companies,
and they may not even know each other when doing their work
And given the huge profits these cybercriminals reap,
they are able to organise themselves into different teams
and carry out attacks more effectively than each person could individually
[ Mikheev ] The hacker world can be divided into 3 main areas:
state hackers like Lazarus from North Korea or the Equation group from the USA
They do espionage, attack defence departments, and things like that
Then there are those who are just out for money
They attack financial institutions and banks, the biggest group is probably Cobalt
They're famous for attacking about 14 countries,
and it's believed – we don't know for sure –
that they've taken in about one billion dollars
And then there are activists who say they fight for good and against evil
Everyone knows Anonymous
It's not really a group, as it has no structure
It's more of a movement whose members share a cause
If they see someone restricting freedom via copyright laws or Internet regulations,
they take revenge as a blow for justice
They're notorious for attacking everyone –
the EU Parliament, young Russian patriots, everyone.
The cool thing is, they have no leader
[ Maher Yamut, Lead Analyst, Kaspersky global research and analysis group ] Eventually, there is a malware attack…
Thousands, may be sometimes millions each day.
This pandemic give, again, another push for cybercriminals to adapt to the situation.
They start targeting the SIM-cards
and the telecom industry.
Why? Because they want to achieve what we call ‘SIM-swapping’.
So they will try to get a clone of your SIM-card,
to clone your mobile number, and then use that on a different phone.
And then convince the bank or convince whoever is attached to that mobile number,
in transferring money and conducting a lot of scam types.
A major organized crime – they adapted to the situation,
they use cyber, they use the technology.
It’s an extension of traditional crime.
[ Hosn ] So we can’t ignore how it’s evolved over the years.
And in order to discuss how it’s evolved, we need to discuss how us –
as people using the digital technologies – have evolved as well.
Everybody is online.
We are all sharing information through social media,
through messaging apps, through all sorts of devices as well.
[ Yamut ] Because everyone is ‘digitized’.
Everyone is moving to online banking, online retail and so on.
There is a smartphone, there is a ‘smart TV’, smart cars, smart homes…
You can’t live without your smartphone,
you can’t live without technology and internet nowadays.
So even if sometimes you would see some impact –
privacy impact, security impact from certain tools and technology that you use –
but people eventually use them,
because they can’t live without them.
[ Sergey Grebennikov, research engineer, autonomous transport systems laboratory, Innopolis University ] Self-driving cars are inevitable
Infrastructure and laws must be prepared to accommodate them
Society will accept their use as a fait accompli
like all innovations that have come before them
A car is a distributed system consisting of control units
It's like a local area computer network
Cars face all the security problems that local computer networks do
It's possible to spy on traffic, launch DDoS attacks, and swap devices
You can impersonate another device
You can use GPS to track a user's location
There are lots of ways to attack: turn sharply at high speed and a car will flip
This traffic isn't encrypted, there's no authorisation
There are already several examples of modern cars being hacked via Bluetooth
Also, many cars are connected to web services that can be hacked as well
[ Hosn ] Connected systems and connected cars,
connected buses, even the connected trains and metros,
they can be hacked.
Some of those cases have happened to US cities.
So, we had San Francisco not too long ago –
get hit hard by a ransomware,
when the entire public transportation system
was completely useless.
They could not recover from it.
A lot of people trying to use the metro, trying to use the trains –
but they could not buy a ticket.
Those situations happen.
They happen in different types of cities.
They haven’t happened in Dubai thankfully yet.
But it’s definitely something that we see a lot of.
To be honest, I’ve always been impressed by what Tesla was doing.
Not just from a car perspective, but how they were picking up on the data.
So now they have so much data and intelligence about autonomous driving.
And I think for me it’s part of being in this new world,
you know, being into an early adapter of electric vehicles.
I wanted to try it, I wanted to experience it.
[ Morgan Ro, chief operating officer, Engineered Arts ] We design and build humanoid robots,
try robots, generate that full size humanoid robots.
We make ones that look like robots – so, plastic, metal.
But we also make a range that human-looking, so life-like silicon skin.
And they not only look, but they also move like a human.
[ Robot ] Do you see the Uber drone behind you? [ Correspondent ] Yes.
[ Robot ] This drone in the future will be used using artificial intelligence.
It is a taxi service.
That is extremely useful thing, don’t you think, my friend Sergey?
[ Correspondent ] And what are the main threats of artificial intelligence?
[ Robot ] Artificial intelligence has not many main threats.
This is due to the three laws of robotics.
A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction
allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by a human being –
except when such orders would conflict with the first law.
[ Nikita Mokhnatkin, Head, Information systems protection sector, Innopolis University ] Artificial intelligence is a very good technology that,
like any tool, can be used for both good and evil
Now, tools like deepfake have appeared and tools that can simulate voices
It lets you see yourself as a young Arnold Schwarzenegger,
but also allows your 'dad' to call and ask you for money to cover an 'emergency'
If a time comes in the future,
when robots appear that are indistinguishable from people,
in fact, that will mean we've created a new life form
And what's wrong if we create a person who, in fact, only differs from us
in that they're made of metal and synthetic materials?
If they benefit society, if they do good, that's great!
That's cool!
[ Ro ] People love robots, say they love talking to him.
The tasks our robots do is to convey messages, is to talk to you.
And the best form to talk to a person is another person.
So instead of just walking to may be a reception
or an airport or wherever –
if there is a humanoid figure or humanoid presence there,
then you are going to think: ‘I can talk to that».
[ Mokhnatkin ] Evolution will occur in two cases:
when artificial intelligence can reason for itself,
and when it's able to learn without a teacher
When it can perform an action and understand why it's doing it
[ Correspondent ] And what do you know about hackers?
[ Robot ] Are you speaking about ethical hackers – or unethical hackers?
[ Correspondent ] Unethical hackers.
[ Robot ] Unethical hackers are indeed a threat. Any machine can be hacked.
[ Mokhnatkin ] Technology is a double-edged sword
with comfort and convenience on one side and the risks it carries on the other
[ Ro ] The world is becoming more digital.
People are not going to become completely reclusive
and only stay and only use digital items.
Even over the past, say, 10 years
you can see how people have changed
through something simple like smartphones.
You look 10 years ago – may be 15 years ago –
if you told yourself or anyone
that you’d have a device
that could track you out, see where you’ve gone,
see whom you’ve been with, see what you’ve bought, everyone would go:
“We can’t do that! That’s…
You know, that’s completely against everyone’s’ liberty.
We can’t do that’.
But look: now everyone’s got that device in their pocket, it’s exactly there.
And people have accepted it.
Because our lives have evolved.
[ Soichet ] Inherently, carry with them…
The more we allow our lives to be taken over –
if you can use that term – with digital aspects,
with IoT, the more open we are to the security threats.
So, it’s a bit of a trade-off, but it is, I think, one – it’s worthwhile.
We continue to battle cybersecurity as best we can.
And it’s one of those things that, I think, this trade-off pays for itself
over and over again.
We can’t deny that the digital transformation is happening -
and it’s a good thing for the humanity.
We have just to be careful.
[ Ro ] What technology would come out – we will all accept.
One of the things that are happening at the minute is cyber implants.
Right now – I am really worried about, and most people would equally be:
‘You can’t put a chip in my brain’.
But this is where I’m saying:
‘Actually, this will be accepted in the future’.
So maybe we will all have implants that will directly connect the outside world to us.
[ Mokhnatkin ] Tell a machine: 'Never throw litter past the trash bin again,'
and it really won't because it's made that way
It won't lie if it's programmed not to
I'd even say machines have certain advantages over people
Of course, the same machine can be programmed to do the exact opposite,
but can this be considered a problem with the machine
if it was a person who programmed it?
[ Ro ] It’s absolutely that in the future
cybercriminals can use artificial intelligence, use machine learning –
to actually find vulnerabilities in other software or other networks.
The information could definitely be hacked in the future –
if there are vulnerabilities in the software –
in the same way that right now your computer could be hijacked.
And your search engine could be redirected to a different web server
which will give you the incorrect information.
[ Hosn ] Cities can be hacked, connected cars can be hacked –
all the different devices now, that are connected to the internet, can be hacked.
[ Ahmed Binfad, Dubai police major ] We have many electronic and smart services,
and digital electronics
linked to each other – to protect the people and to assure they are safe.
We are using drones to analyze if there is any major, like accident or anything,
to reach the people and to keep them safe and to save their lives.
All these systems are integrated to generate
a very powerful foundation
for security and happiness in Dubai, at the same time.