26 SECURITY FOCUS Cyber Threats
TV5Monde attack was perpetrated by APT28 (aka Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, et al), a cyber espionage group allied with Russian military intelligence. APT28 has been implicated in a long list of hacks including the attack on the Democratic National Committee in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and an attack on British broadcaster Islam TV in 2017. Data is the new oil – so goes the cliche – and every hour of our lives we receive and send tremendous amounts of it. Wherever media is sent and received, whether it’s being downloaded from the camera to a storage device or is leaving the phone to be consumed by your brain, is part of what in cybersecurity is called an ‘attack surface’. An attack surface is the sum total of a system’s vulnerabilities to cyberattack. In the media world, that attack surface can be very wide indeed and the stakes can be very high. SECURITY OFFICER Denis Onuoha is the chief information security officer at Arqiva, a major national infrastructure operator in the UK responsible for radio and free-to-air TV transmission as well as services for data comms and satellite uplinking. It’s Onuoha’s job to oversee the company’s information assurance, cybersecurity architecture, incident response and security awareness. “Part of my job is fending off day-to day hackers,” says Onuoha, “I also make sure we’ve battened down the hatches with regards to larger threats.”
Onuoha is also the chair of the AIB Cybersecurity Working Group. The AIB (Association for International Broadcasting, aib.org.uk) is a trade organisation that helps protect the interests of content owners distributing content internationally. A fair percentage of AIB members are major – often state-funded – broadcasters, with significant news departments and are high- profile targets for cyberattack, especially for politically driven organisations looking to make a dramatic statement. The working group’s purpose is to improve the maturity of cybersecurity across the broadcast industry. The AIB is in the process of commissioning a Cybersecurity Centre of Excellence, developed in industry can strengthen the whole media supply chain against digital malfeasance. “The level of maturity for broadcast is different for different countries. Some may care a lot about cyber, but others still don’t see cyber as a big threat,” explains Onuoha. The lucrative nature of cybercrime and the increased consumerisation collaboration with London’s Royal Holloway University. The goal is to establish an end-to-end lab where academia and
of technology has resulted in a “perfect storm”, he says, with many potential points of access available to multiple, highly motivated attackers. He points to ransomware attacks on newspapers last year, including the Los Angeles Times . There can be a lot of money to be made and attacks can be very difficult to track. “We now have a full IP world, so the risk has increased,” says Onuoha, “but my perspective, which may be a bit controversial, is that the risk was always there. It’s just that now cyberhacking is a multibillion-dollar industry. It’s not that the technology is inherently weaker – though there are elements of that – now there’s more motivation for taking things offline.”
YOU HAVE SO MANY PLATFORMS THAT ARE CONSUMERISED, IT GIVES HACKERS ACCESS TO EASY REVERSE ENGINEERING TO FIND HOLES
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