Interview by Adeline Jacob from SmartCities, translation by itrust consulting. There are viruses that attack bodies while there are others that attack computer systems. Neither type will have spared us in 2020, challenging both health and cybersecurity experts. Carlo Harpes, founder and managing director, and Guillaume Schaff and Matthieu Aubigny, Security Consultants at itrust consulting, analyse these current events and present the solutions proposed by the company to best navigate in this cyber-insecurity climate. Has Covid-19 resulted in a more favourable setting for the resurgence of cyber-attacks? Carlo Harpes: We were astonished when, at the beginning of the pandemic, the Luxembourg authorities announced that there had been no measured increase in cyber-attacks. This message went against our perception and our predictions. Finally, in August, Avast stated that the threat had increased by 27% for Luxembourg citizens. Most recently, we also learned that certain pieces of American security software had been breached. Almost at the same time, the world witnessed the longest shutdown of authenticated services from Google, WhatsApp, etc., in the world. We can indeed say that insecurity is increasing. Guillaume Schaff: Studies have shown that phishing attacks increased significantly during the first lockdown (1). Hackers play a lot on human emotions to achieve their goals. The climate of fear in which we lived in March was therefore beneficial to them. Matthieu Aubigny: In addition, there has been stress phenomenon at the telecommunications infrastructure level, and small vulnerabilities have probably become more significant as a result. These failures, however, have had the virtue of increasing the level of resilience of a certain number of tools. In the United States, one attack, in particular, made a lot of noise… Carlo Harpes: The Treasury Department and the National Telecommunications Administration were victims of a cyber-attack orchestrated by expert hackers inventoried APT29 who, according to the FBI, are linked to the Russian government. The attack in question on the Orion management software (network control/surveillance tool) of the American company SolarWinds was indirectly aimed at its clients: in addition to American federal agencies, the malware infiltrated leading companies in the IT world such as Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Belkin or Microsoft without us knowing its real impact. To this day, it remains an unknown and a risk, because anyone capable of using SolarWind to penetrate Microsoft could also have used Microsoft to infiltrate its customers. These are speculations, but the underlying method, called a supply… Read more »

The ‘Russian attack on US’ by loosly protected update of the security software ‘Orion’ was well explained as ‘universal espionnage attack on the world’, by ‘Bruce Schneier’. Our hint: ‘Basically don’t trust market leader software providers; they are a spying attack vector! Rather use niche products and open source software’.