Breaking up dark clouds in cyberspace

Source: Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski. The Globe and Mail.

Crime and espionage form a dark underworld of cyberspace. Whereas crime is usually the first to seek out new opportunities and methods, espionage usually follows in its wake, borrowing techniques and tradecraft. The Shadows in the Cloud report, released today, illustrates the increasingly dangerous ecosystem of crime and espionage and its embeddedness in the fabric of global cyberspace.

As our everyday lives move online, criminals and spies have migrated to this domain. They leverage complex, adaptive attack techniques to take advantage of the fissures that have emerged in an era where “e” is everything. Every new software, social networking site, cloud-computing system, or web-hosting service represents opportunities for the predatory criminal ecosystem to subvert, adapt, and exploit.