Sabotage

The internet isn’t just for buying stuff you don’t need and sharing selfies. Large numbers of control systems use the internet for communication and control. It is possible to use the internet to disrupt the control of systems that operate real things in the real world. The internet can be, and has been, used for sabotage.

In December of 2015, the lights went out across a large region of Ukraine. This power failure has been attributed to a spearphishing attack.  A 2014 report published by Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security  attributes the sabotage of a German steel plant to spearphishing. In 2012, a spearphishing attack damaged 30,000 computers at Aramco, the Saudi oil company. These are just a few examples of the real world damage that emails can cause.

These damaging attacks succeeded because email is ideally suited to social engineering scams. You can fight back using SP Guard. SP Guard fights email impersonation schemes.