14 DAY TRIAL // Assessing the threat is never an easy thing to do and doing it with promptitude is even harder. Cyber-attacks have been something a lot of countries have been fearing with the Internet advancing at such a high speed. But only recently have a lot of scary possibilities popped up. And I'm saying recently and not pointing to a certain time period, because nobody knows for sure when these possibilities appeared. I guess that governments and secret agencies knew about this stuff months, or years before any journalist could find out about anything, so I believe that some feared cyber-attacks for quite a long time.
One of the most feared things on the Web is the zero-day attack. This means that hackers exploit a vulnerability that is yet unpatched; this is pretty severe, that's why the NSA (United States National Security Agency) has decided to take matters into their own hands. They've hired a great hacker - one that has even been sentenced for 7 years, for hacking offences - this guy was supposed to create worms from scratch, as The Register informs.
So what would be the purpose of such an initiative? Well, let me explain - the NSA also gave a lot of money to Iometrix, to build a platform that would fight off zero-day attacks. As I've read on The Register, their program detected both samples of malicious code developed by the hacker, but only three of the eight malware samples supplied by the NSA. So, this is improvement with cyber-security, in my opinion. These guys are on the right track, they're definitely going to do something good! By using this platform, they're protected against any attacks coming from world renowned hacker groups, from Russia, China, Romania and others. Seems to me that fear is the best catalyst when talking about threat assessment.