Dmitri Alperovitch of Crowdstrike “The reality is that there isn’t a cyber air force – it is up to companies to protect themselves.”
Dmitri, Alperovitch, Co-founder and CTO of Crowdstrike on cyber-attacks
“There really are two problems we foresee here. One is the destructive attacks were starting to see take place in Ukraine.”
“We have seen for the first time ever parts of the electric grid in Ukraine being shut down through cyber-attack, we’ve never seen that before. We’ve seen attempted attacks on the Kiev airport. This really shows us what can be done through cyber from a destructive perspective – not just in Ukraine, but everywhere else in the world because all of these systems are interconnected.”
“The other part of the problem that we see is the continuing economic espionage that’s taking place largely done by China but other countries as well – against Western companies – intellectual property, trade secrets are being stolen by the truckload.”
“Nearly every major company today is facing this onslaught. We have worked with one company in particular – American Superconductor has lost a billion dollars in stock market value because a competitor in China has stolen their intellectual property – they make software for wind turbines that make them must more efficient. A Chinese competitor has taken their software and undercut them on price. As a result American Superconductor has laid off hundreds of employees, lost a tremendous number of contracts.”
“A tremendous number of companies have taken a huge hit as a result of this activity.”
“This is happening all over the world, every major company, every economic sector where there’s technology, agriculture, energy – you name it – is facing this onslaught.”
“The reality of cyber space today is that companies are on their own. The government isn’t going to protect you. There isn’t a cyber air-force.”
The Obama administration for the first time ever said that economic sanctions would be taken in response to the Chinese types of cyber-attacks.
“There are three actors: nation-states. Russia, China, intelligence services and military services. They are the number one player. Then you have criminal groups a lot of them are eastern European, a lot of them are Latin American. They are perpetrating economic crimes and financial crimes through cyber-attacks. Then you have hack-tavist groups and terrorist groups, they’re trying to orchestrate these attacks for political purposes, or for propaganda purposes.”
“We have seen some indications that Isis is developing these capabilities. When you look at the foreign fighters that are flooded into Syria a number of them are highly educated. Jihadi John was famously a computer science student in the UK.”
“It is worrisome that you have educated people with the propensity to do harm that can now orchestrate these attacks in the safety of Syria.”