EMERGING THREATS IN CYBER SPACE#

Enn Tyugu#

Institute of Cybernetics of Tallinn University of Technology
lead research scientist, http://cs.ioc.ee/~tyugu/
e-mail: tyugu@ieee.org

Abstract

Information assurance has become a fast developing subfield of informatics. However, the threats in Internet and the cyber crime are developing faster than the defense. The research in this field is mainly reactive -- the cyber threats appear first, thereafter new defense solutions are developed. Estonia fell under a cyber attack in April 2007. Thereafter, a NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence was established in Estonia in 2008 with participation of ten countries today http://www.ccdcoe.org, and international master studies in cyber security began in Tallinn University of Technology http://www.ttu.ee/programmes/master-studies-2/cyber-security.

The research in cyber security includes traditional directions like cryptology, secure software development, malware etc. But it is also closely related to legal studies (development of international cyber laws), social studies (analysis of behavior of hactivists in cyber space), operations research and economy (selection of reasonable defense measures).

Looking into the future, one can predict the increasing intelligence of malware. It is highly probable that a cyber weapon of the future will be an autonomous intelligent agent with some planning ability (see “Proc. 3rd International Conference on Cyber Conflict [ICCC],” IEEEXplore, 2011.)

A scenario of development of intelligent malware in coming decades is discussed under the assumptions that computing will change from data processing to knowledge processing, and the development of intelligence of computers will follow the same path as the increase of performance of hardware. This requires a shift of attention of researchers from traditional data security and protocol security to knowledge level of cyber threats and defense.