‘Real Time’ Cyber Insights for 7th September from The National Cyber Skills Centre

During the summer of 1993 without any prior warning, I was an eyewitness to a plane crash. Two Mig 29 fighters from Russia were performing an aerobatic display at the Royal International Air Tattoo, held at Fairford in Gloucestershire when they collided in mid-air and came tumbling to the ground in massive fireballs.

Miraculously there were no injuries with both pilots ejecting safely. The official investigation determined that pilot error was the cause after one pilot did a reverse loop and disappeared into the clouds, the other one lost sight of his wingman and aborted the routine.

What sticks in my mind most about this event was how seemingly robust technology, technology that less than 5 years previously had been on the Russian side of the Cold War, was reduced to nothing in a matter of seconds by one single flaw. In this case, the flaw was human. Millions of pounds of hardware investment lay in a pile that was no longer of any significant use. I watched as the wreckage was packed up and shipped off to, I assume, a secret location where military grade aircraft accident investigators would forensically analyse this former adversary’s technology.

Fast forward almost quarter of a century and you can actually watch, in real time, the relentless attempts to compromise the flaws in today’s leading edge technology by cyber criminals. For a couple of years now the team at Kaspersky have been running an interactive cyberthreat map that is almost hypnotic in its illustrations of attempted attacks. 

Read the rest over at Cyber Insights, brought to you by the National Cyber Skills Centre.

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