If you have ever felt like something is wrong about your electronic devices, you are not alone. It may be a simple technical problem, but we cannot guarantee that. Someone might be manipulating your computer systems behind closed doors. Cybersecurity attacks are a ubiquitous issue that affects every corner of our world, regardless of your age, gender, or ethnicity. The frequency of cybersecurity attacks rapidly increased due to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, even after the virus has been quieted, the rate of cyber attacks is still maintained. Accordingly, in our world today, cybersecurity attacks occur 2,220 times a day and have been rated the fifth top rated risk in 2020. It has become a new but massive societal problem across public and private sectors. According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2023 report, the charge for each cybersecurity attack in the public sector averages a considerable $2.60 million (sosafe, 2023). The frequency of cybersecurity attacks is expected to double by 2025.

According to the FY2024-2026 Cyber Security Strategic Plan, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called for a blueprint that explains how the agency will promote a future where “damaging cyber attacks are a shocking anomaly”. Despite the continuous updates from their website, the trend of cybersecurity attacks is continuously rising. The fight to reduce cybersecurity attacks has greater implications not only for the massive loss of people’s personal data but also for its dangerous potential to be used as a weapon between conflicting nations.

The Deadly Beginning and the Way it Affects Individuals

Amidst the tense atmosphere of various problems, Korea is currently not included in the highest 10 countries of origin for cyber attacks. In 2021, China ranked first as the place of origin for the highest number of cyber attacks, the United States of America closely following after.

When and where the first cybersecurity attack happened is a question to answer. Surprisingly, compared to the recent acknowledgement of the problem, the first cybersecurity attack dates back to 1834 in France, well before the internet was even invented. What happened is that attackers stole financial market information by accessing the French telegraph system. Investigators could not find the footing of the crime until the late 20th century.

Compared to the old days, current cyber security attacks happen in a very analytical yet extremely vicious form. Unlike old attackers who captured faults in the security of computers to hack systems, new emerging attackers primarily focus on exploiting victims themselves. With the US government laying out its plans to spend a total of $14.5 billion on hindering cyber security attacks and one of the most prominent companies ‘Apple’ launching Unix-based Macs forces the attackers to take a different route for their mischievous actions. In other terms, vulnerable private sectors including civilians become targets. The problem here is attackers are continuously increasing the sophistication of their manipulative systems.

As people stepped into the 21st century and encountered the influx of rapid technological advancements, attackers took advantage of harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity attacks. Malicious actors devise sophisticated attacks aimed at circumventing security protocols. These scheming maneuvers are shown in crimes such as but not limited to: phishing, spoofing, malware, and Denial-of-service attack (DoS) where victims are completely malleable, especially in phishing. Phishing, also referred to as ‘Voice Phishing’ is known as one of the most archetypal types of cybercrimes, with over 500 million phishing attacks reported in 2022 with 300,497 phishing victims losing a total of $52,089,159. The reported number is over double the number of reported attacks in 2021. Civilians are highly vulnerable in terms of phishing because they usually leave traces of their personal information in internet platforms like email and text. 62% of the world's population can utilize this data in various unrestricted ways (Chaffey, 2024).

April 23th, 2024, a married couple living in Jeju Island received a call from their daughter studying abroad in Chicago. Daughter from the call was urgently repeating that she was kidnapped and imprisoned. Shortly after, an unfamiliar voice of man threatened the couple to send money immediately if they wanted to see their daughter alive again. Daughter’s father instantly reported this incident to the police. The police successfully managed to block the money that was going to be transferred to the voice phisher. After being confirmed that their daughter was safe through the consulate in Chicago, the reporter and his wife were able to relax. “The voice from the phone at the time was identical to my daughter's,” stated her father.

Due to the development of AI technology, it is highly possible that the voice phisher utilized a voice modulated from AI tools. Unlike past voice phishers who randomly called people, wishing everything on their luck, current phishers make the sound of the victim impeccably realistic. These voice phishers first hack smartphones or websites to draw out any left traces of unprotected personal data. In the case of Korea, they normally hire Chinese hackers who hack or find information on targeted victims. After identifying the victim's infirmity based on the contact they obtained, they secretly draw out a voice recorded in a call saved on a mobile phone or a video uploaded in SNS to create the new “conversation voice” using AI which makes it identical to their actual voice.

The bigger problem is that these can be extended beyond voice manipulation to actual video calls. ‘Deep Fake’, a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered can be utilized in crimes committed by phishers. These Deep Fake videos are already being used in countries like China, that force people to transfer 800 million dollars by calling civilians with a face of their close friends.

Exploring the International Fallout of Cybersecurity Attacks

Veiled for the purpose of earning money or obtaining confidential information, cybersecurity attacks are highly underestimated by the public, a lot of people thinking “Who would transfer money that easily”. The problem here is that voice phishing is merely one type of crime that can be committed among myriad cyber attacks that are possible.

Although it is true that between 80 to 95% of cyberattacks begin with phishing, they are quickly diffused into something else. A Chinese hacker group attacked websites related to the academic institutions in South Korea over the 2023 Lunar New Year holiday. “The next target is the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA)” The hacker group, which identifies itself as ‘Dawn Cavalry’ stated in a message in Chinese and English. Although some of the compromised websites have recovered and are functioning normally, most are still not recuperating from the attack. Hacked homepages portrayed a message of the hacker group’s logo and name in Chinese characters and English as shown in the image below:

“We will continue to hack Korea’s public and government networks, and looking forward to our next move, we will hack a wide range of internal South Korean networks” - Dawn Cavalry.

“Our team is an independent team. Our team will use South Korea as a training ground for members, and every one of them will take part in actions invading South Korea” - Dawn Cavalry.

KISA still cannot confirm the true identity of hackers and whether they were state-sponsored. It is difficult to identify who those hackers are and why they targeted South Korea, and why the cyberattack occurred during holiday. These unanswered inquiries reveal the fatal problem of cyber attacks where it is hard for cyber police agencies to track the true identity of the attackers. As a result, South Korean educational websites that were supposed to help impaired people were blocked and personal information of 161 citizens were exposed publicly.

Cybersecurity breaches every corner of our globe, not only restricted to hacking between private entities and attackers, but even spreading out to affect the Russian-Ukraine war. Ukraine’s internet security was rigorously tested by relentless cyber attacks from a variety of hackers. A Russian affiliated hacker group targeted over 1,500 government, public, and private entities. They had to defend themselves from hacking attackers on telecom operators, avoid phishing attacks aimed at government agencies, and even had to dig for malware and translation software that superficially revealed it was completely innocent. Unfortunately, these are just a fraction of the more than 200 separate instances of Russia hacking Ukraine throughout the war. The Ukraine government, as a retaliation, lured a formidable ally to join their side: the hacker collective ‘Anonymous’. This notorious hacking group not only returned what Russian had first posed, but also declared war on Russia. They leaked a lot of sensitive data from Russian Sberbank, with one hacker collective even managing to cause an explosion on the hydropower plane causing massive economic damage. Thankfully, in this incident, there were no deaths or harm caused by the explosion. However, this is not always the case.

Unfortunately, the impact of continuous hacks is not limited to Russian citizens alone; Ukrainian citizens are also suffering. For instance, on December 12th, a hack from Russia disabled services provided by Ukraine's largest telecoms operator, affecting 24 million civilian users. This attack is a big message, not only to Ukraine but to the whole Western world to understand the extent of cybersecurity attacks on civilians.

The cyber war witnessed between Russia and Ukraine exemplifies the pervasive nature of cybersecurity threats, extending beyond mere private sector conflicts to influence global geopolitical dynamics.

What can we do about it?

Several initiatives have been undertaken to tackle this issue. Large enterprises and organizations have been installing a system called ‘honeypot’. Enterprise networks are usually large and complex. The more devices the company adds to them, the complexity increases proportionally. Honeypot is a trap created by organizations to attract hackers into their computer system. One of the main objectives of using a honeypot is to monitor the hacker’s exploit of the system’s vulnerabilities. Subsequently, they can learn their system’s weaknesses and apply necessary security measures to strengthen it from future attacks. Another objective is to study the hacker’s methodology.

This tactic is an example of a strong protective factor that guards the significant public sectors from various security hazards. However, unprotected private sectors and residents continue to be exposed to specific targeted attacks. The lack of adequate protection for private sectors and civilians poses a significant barrier to maximum security.

One possible way to solve this is by utilizing blockchain for identity management. In this way, each user will possess a unique digital identity stored on the blockchain, making it nearly impossible for hackers to steal their identities. Traditional identity management systems store vulnerable data in centralized databases, easily exposing them to hackers. However, with blockchain, each user's identity information will be stored across a network of computers rather than a single location. Additionally, once data is recorded on the blockchain, it would not be altered or deleted, reinforcing the self-sovereign identity. Azerbaijan has a blockchain-powered identification system that relates to the robust spine of national ID records and offers a range of security in both the public and private sectors. It also uses an AI-powered video registration system. To alleviate the threat of AI-created deep fakes, it also asks users to answer several random questions during the registration process to strain venomous hackers. Similarly, Estonia completely digitized public services with its e-Estonia. Citizens can file their national taxes online in minutes and even vote online thanks to digital identities created for them as soon as they were born. Accordingly, Estonia has the second strongest cybersecurity in the world with 85.83% of blocking successfully done.

Unfortunately, implementing a blockchain system is not effective enough to reduce the national cybersecurity attacks rate. While implementing a blockchain system can contribute to cybersecurity, it does not guarantee lower cybersecurity attacks by itself. As the most recent

data from 2024 indicates that 45% of global organizations will be impacted in some way by a supply chain attack, this shows that a cybersecurity attack cannot be solved easily since it is a relatively new issue that appeared on this ground. However, through a symphony of collective action, harmonizing scientific, political, and social awareness, the possibility of restoration will eventually emerge.