Juha Saarinen: Cybervillains revelling in a war of the words

When ransomware bandits want to buy a new Lamborghini or similar treat, they need to swap computer files for real money - and that's easier said than done. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

Reaching out to my faithful audience, it has become necessary to progress the conversation on popular IT terms and topics. Yes, I borrowed that excellent expression from a PR person pushing the boundaries of the English language.

Let’s start with cyber, a term that continues to skyrocket in popularity. A recent and not very long information security newsletter contained 27 instances of cyber, and there’s no reason to think people will ever tire of the word.

That’s because it’s incredibly versatile even though it doesn’t actually mean anything. IT veterans try to avoid using cyber and instinctively check that their webcams are covered or taped over as the word used to refer to, err, people hanging out with each other over the internet.

Now, everything is cyberised. Cyber defence, cyber attack, cyberspace, cyber fires and much more.

Want to justify big spending on a company’s cyber defence? Give management and boards the vision that there are balaclava-wearing cyber attackers ready to exploit an organisation’s weak cyber posture, and could already be running rampant in the corporate network.

In reality, it means that someone’s found access to your network and computers, and is busy typing weird commands or running code that do unexpected things.

Doing so wreaks havoc with IT systems that we have outsourced our information storage and cognitive capacity to, and is known as a cyber hack.

Cyber is often combined with security. That’s mysterious, as there is no such thing as security. Anything and everything can and will be cyber-hacked. The only way to stop that is to take people’s computers away and dismantle the internet to boot them out of cyberspace.

The cyber-hacked always get an email saying the compromised company in question takes their privacy seriously. That assumes the company’s email systems haven’t been hacked and destroyed of course. If that happens, you need to locate your privacy on the dark web which isn’t dark. Nor is it a web.

Most of the time it’s a computer that ransomware raiders have accounts on, posting copied-over information that companies shouldn’t have collected as it’s sensitive and liable to cause users huge amounts of trouble.

The cyber bandits will threaten to make that data public, unless you pay a goodly amount of money. You pay, and then the data gets sold to others who might ask for more money, or abuse the information in a creative fashion.

Originally a noun, privacy is now better used as a verb. As in: “I was privacied last week, and now an identity thief has taken out multiple loans in my name and laundered money for North Korea’s nuclear programme.”

From this you can deduce that ransomware freebooters remain an important part of the cyber economy. They regularly bring in much-needed foreign exchange for pariah nations through cryptocurrencies, which are computer files that have wildly fluctuating values assigned to them.

Blockchain hassles for cyberhighwaymen

Cryptocurrencies aren’t useful for anything else than extortion payments so when ransomware bandits want to buy a new Lamborghini, they need to swap the computer files for real money.

This happens at crypto exchanges, with all transactions recorded forever in immutable databases called blockchains much to the ransomware criminals’ chagrin.

To make it less obvious where the crypto dosh is destined, various complex schemes such as splitting up transactions in millions of little ones that go through multiple exchanges are devised.

That’s easy to do with computer files sent over networks. The same computer-file-sending technique can also be used in so-called rug pulls. In these, crypto exchange owners make off with users’ funds.

How much money exactly is impossible to estimate, as rug pulls can cause cryptocurrency values to tank sharply. It could be millions, it could be billions; all depends on the type of computer file.

The above paints a complex scenario that’s difficult to understand, but humanity is responding to the situation with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Those in the know call it AI/ML.

It is a fascinating technology that can do all sorts of things like recognise faces of white people and unveiled Iranian women, autonomously drive electric vehicles and brake them suddenly for interesting pile-ups. Soon, AI/ML will write technology columns like this one if it hasn’t done so already.

AI/ML can be fully trusted as it is trained on, among other things, large amounts of text from web forums in which engineers ask their peers how to code something.

This is called computer programming. There are any number of ways to program, ranging from more or less correctly, to unexpectedly wrong with disastrous consequences.

By chatting to sufficiently large AIs like current ones with the cognitive capability of a squirrel, coders no longer need to display their ignorance in web forums. Instead, they get it served up by a machine which in turn learns more from the humans asking it feeble questions.

In a similar fashion, cyber defenders are embracing AI/ML to create code for algorithms that can rapidly detect anomalies in data traffic and on computer systems, and alert and take action accordingly.

It’s a technology holy grail that’s been worked on since forever. Humans quickly learn that stepping out into a busy road without looking is bad whereas computers don’t, which is suboptimal.

Cyber crooks are discovering the power of AI/ML too, which was to be expected. Who will win the race remains to be seen (and experienced) but we can definitely look forward to an exciting AI/ML-cybered immediate future. Oh yes.