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Imagine that a hacker closes the baggage handling system of one of the busiest airports in the world. Or took control of a fleet of autonomous delivery trucks and rerouted them to disrupt rush-hour traffic in a major metropolis. What would happen if the hacker demanded a ransom to unlock the digital networks that they had diverted?
According to Akamai's latest report on the state of the internet, one of the world's largest providers of servers and computer networks, these scenarios are not fantasies of any distant dystopia. They are just around the corner.
Technology continues to evolve with advances in artificial intelligence, automation, biometrics and an Internet of Things in full expansion. This results in a growing and potentially catastrophic risk of malicious actors who undermine the digital infrastructure and the services of society that depend on it.
Although we are not yet there, several disturbing trends are highlighted in the report
DDoS for hire
The first concern is an increase in the frequency and volume of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS ) – up 16% over the last year. These attacks are bombarding computers with huge amounts of data. They are used by malicious actors to disrupt and delay networks and make them inaccessible to their users.
The most famous DDoS attacks were against Estonia in 2007, closing banks, media organizations and government departments. and the amount of data exploited in such attacks has grown exponentially. According to the Akamai report, the biggest DDoS attack in history was recorded last February against a software development company. This was a data flow of 1.35 terabytes (1350 gigabytes) per second
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