Please note that botnets, which I mentioned above, were used to cripple the Georgian infrastructure. The zombie computers used in these botnets didn't come out of Russia, either. Some of them were traced right back to this country. In the current environment, you don't need to be in a physical location to take command and control; it might happen from anywhere.
The report also mentions attacking electrical grids and that the CIA has intelligence that this has already occurred in other countries. Just last month, the Wall Street Journal issued an article stating that Russian and Chinese hackers had mapped the U.S. power grid and left behind software that in theory could be used to attack our electrical grid. The article quoted unnamed officials from within the government. This set off a flurry of articles and in the end, most of the experts concluded that the threat, although real, wasn’t as bad as it was hyped up to be. Nonetheless, hacking certain utilities, such as electricity, water, and sewage could cause a lot of serious problems and there is evidence it has been accomplished in other countries.
While cyber warfare is an ominous subject, the report points out that we have already seen some pretty major events when financial systems were successfully attacked. Examples given were the TJX data breach (45 million payment cards compromised) and the more recent WorldPay payment card breach where a 30 minute exploit netted nine million dollars. This highly coordinated scheme took place all over the United States, Montreal, Moscow, and Hong Kong in a very short time-frame.
There is tangible evidence that so much personal and financial information has been stolen that the laws of supply and demand are driving prices down. Interestingly enough, a lot of this information is traded right over the Internet in anonymous forums using hard to trace forms of payment.
Two recent reports point to this. Symantec released a pretty interesting report on the underground economy and shortly afterwards, Verizon issued another report on the state of personal and financial information being stolen. The Verizon report, pointed out that the 285 million "known" records stolen in 2008 amounted to more than what was recorded in the previous three years. The Symantec report, which breaks down the going prices for information noted that the practice of spoofing (impersonating) financial institutions to steal information grew from 10 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2008. The Symantec report stated that 90 percent of the attacks being launched via botnets were designed to steal information and that the number of infected computers had grown 31 percent in 2008 over 2007, also.
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