Emerging Mega Cyber Crimes - Attacks upon National Security and Sovereignty, by Peter Boyce

Cyber crimes appear to becoming mega sized and more prevalent, thus more threatening to the national security and sovereignty of targeted nation states. Therefore, any such criminal and malicious acts upon the privacy of citizens, governments, banking, energy, retail, other areas and now, most recently, on the food industry, should be construed as acts of war on victimized nations. Ransomware attacks and other cyber crimes targeting the secure function and operation of a nation should be met with the same response a nation state would give to a 'hot war'.

In the past decade, cyber crimes, perpetrated by apparent unidentified actors operating under, or not under the sponsorship of some rogue state, have moved from credit card swipes and government eavesdropping to now include ransomware attacks on sectors ranging from health, to energy and now to food. Such attacks are acts against a country's national security and its sovereignty.

The energy sector in the past couple of weeks, according to media reports, paid some $4.4 million to cyber hijackers after their gained control of a large gas pipeline in the Southeast United States (US). And as reported today by media outlets, the world's largest meat supplier has now become the latest victim of ransomware hijackers, thus putting in jeopardy the livelihood of thousands of workers in the US, Canada and Australia, while threatening the meat supply equation amid a risk of higher meat prices.

The time has arrived for intelligence communities to identify these cyber criminals and for governments to exact just punishment upon at least one guilty group in order to deter others from attacking the national security and sovereignty of nations via this modern criminality.