Expect Us.
Activist hacker collective, Anonymous has gone orbital in their coordinated attack on Russian Government websites and platform services, knocking many of them offline.
They are also hitting the commercial sector hard in countries where organisations supporting Vladimir Putin’s regime are being exposed with leaks of information like emails, employee names and key businesses relationships, now occurring in real-time.
The cyber war is just beginning.
With this weeks escalation of conflict between Ukraine & Russia, attention has been focused on the increase in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. Targeting hospitals, government agencies and news services addresses one of the tenets of war: create confusion and disrupt communications channels amongst your enemy. War is a psychological event and anything that can be done to demoralise your enemy or disrupt what they assume and expect whittles away at confidence and capability.
With my day job at Inhabit responsible for running a complex, multi country, multi lingual network of computers, servers and platforms, it got me thinking about some of the security services and software potentially being employed.
Specifically security software and its country of origin and/or base of operations.
Is this something that should even be considered?
Could a commercial entity in a nation state on a war footing be compromised?
Could the commercial reputation and quality be overtaken by nation state nationalistic fervor, legal directive or coercion?
Questions to ponder.
Below is a snapshot of the major cyber security vendors out there. Really diverse!
| Vendor | Country of Origin | Website | Founded | HQ | Employees (Year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kaspersky | Russia | https://kaspersky.com | 1997 | Moscow, Russia | 4,000 (2020) |
| BitDefender | Romania | https://www.bitdefender.com/ | 2001 | Bucharest, Romania | 1,600 (2019) |
| Comodo | United Kingdom | https://www.comodo.com | 1998 | Bloomfield, New Jersey, USA | 1,200 |
| McAfee | United States | https://www.mcafee.com | 1987 | San Jose, California, USA | 6,900 (2020) |
| Broadcom (formerly Symantec) | United States | https://www.broadcom.com | 1982 | Tempe, Arizona, USA | 3,659 (2020) |
| ESET | Czechoslovakia | http://www.eset.com | 1992 | Bratislava, Slovakia | 1,684 (2019) |
| Sophos | United Kingdom | https://www.sophos.com | 1985 | Abingdon, UK | 3,600 (2021) |
| Avast (formerly AVG Technologies) | Czech Republic | https://www.avast.com | 1988 | Prague | 1700 (2021) |
| CheckPoint | Israel | http://checkpoint.com | 1993 | Tel Aviv, Israel | 5,200 (2020) |
| Malwarebytes | Poland | https://www.malwarebytes.com | 2008 | Santa Clara, California, USA | 800 (2017) |
| Panda | Spain | http://www.pandasecurity.com | 1990 | Madrid, Spain | 500 |
| Trend Micro | United States | https://www.trendmicro.com | 1988 | Irving, Texas, USA | 6,975 (2020) |
| F-Secure | Finland | http://www.f-secure.com | 1988 | Helsinki, Finland | 1,678 (2020) |
The Culture Mind 