Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack

Mikko Hypponen is a cybercrime expert, he is the CEO of F-Secure Corporation. In this talk, Hypponen reminded us that we are more likely to be victims of cyber crimes than ever before. He believes this situation will only get worse. Hypponen talked about three types of online attacks on privacy and data. The first one is online criminals. Their motivation is making money, such as stealing money from the bank through banking trojans. The second type of online attack is conducted by a group of people called "hacktivists". They are not motivated by money. Instead, they are motivated by protest, opinion, etc... These two types of attacks are considered as crime action. However, the third type of online attack is not. These kinds of attacks are conducted by governments. For example, the totalitarian governments in Egypt bought a set of tools for intercepting the communications of their own citizen. Ironically, these tools are provided by a Western country, Germany. In fact, Western government itself like Germany also used some tools to intercept people who are suspect in a criminal case. (My opinion: This talk was given in 2011. The recent news shows that even countries like the U.S. are found to be spying against their own citizens) Hypponen also mentioned about a government attack which compromises CA. (My opinion: This type of attack is extremely serious because CA is assumed to be authentic and safe in technical design. If CA is compromised, attacker can easily issue fraudulent certificates and they are surely trusted by every browser in the world) Therefore, Hypponen believes this is the question we should be worried about. This is not a question between privacy against security. It’s a question of freedom against control