Echoes of Cyberwar

Originally published in El Español - QuinceMil (29/03/2025)

The alarm goes off and, with your eyes still in a fog, you can’t work out why you can’t get into your email. But you think, I’ll sort it out later. You get ready, wake yourself up and get to work, only to realise that it isn’t just your email: you can’t get into anything you need to do your job. No access to your customer and supplier data, your accounts or your file repository; you can’t do a single thing related to what puts money into your personal bank account to pay your bills. The feeling is one of complete helplessness, and sadly it’s a reality for a lot of people every week. In such a digitised and interconnected world, a cyberattack is the difference between staying in the market and disappearing from it.

Fines of 10M euros or 2% of turnover, whichever is higher, not only for the company but also for its executives: that is what Europe proposes in its NIS2 Directive to tackle the lack of cybersecurity measures at many organisations, yes, plenty of SMEs included, within its territory. Is the fear of losing everything, or of being fined, enough? Experience tells us that, for now, it isn’t. That everything we technologists keep raising awareness about only ever happens to other people. Cybercrime is a booming industry, even if to many it may seem like something out of an episode of an HBO series. We live in strange times, when a war 4,000 kilometres away can leave us without a company and send us to the dole queue. Pro-Russian hacktivist groups such as NoName057(16) have been attacking Spanish companies for a while now; without looking any further, in recent months they have disrupted the running of public administrations and businesses in Galicia. They are not the only ones: the so-called Z Pentest Alliance have been disrupting factories around the world, even toying with the drinkability of the water at some water treatment plants. And no, this is not a fantasy. There is literature on them and, what’s more, cybersecurity expert Rafa López and I recently got to see first-hand just how determined and ruthless these cyberterrorist groups are.

The Deep Web is full of marketplaces trading in the data of countless people and companies.

Data used to hold companies’ data and operations hostage, data used to pull off elaborate scams on individuals; data, in short, for them to get rich and leave us out on the street.

And I could go on at great length about the practices the various groups use to rob us and gain the upper hand… Did you know, dear reader, that there are people working for North Korea whose main goal is to get inside companies and organisations in order to compromise them over the long term? <<It’s the market, my friend!>>, those on the dark side will be thinking, but we will have to keep working so that we can get up tomorrow and carry on with our humble lives.

▶ Video: La CiberSemana - Interview with Z Pentest Alliance

Originally published on LinkedIn on 30 March 2025.