Cyber attacks and defenses: current capabilities and future trends

In the new cyber landscape, the legal rules apply only to defenders. Even nonprimary countries and companies may constitute a harmful adversarial scenario for politics, military, intelligence, and enterprises. Attackers can leverage physical distance from targets, different laws, anonymity, and almost impossible attribution, known and unknown software vulnerabilities, human weaknesses, and many freely available tools. Defenders need expensive security frameworks, cyber procedures and competent people guarding vulnerable surfaces with no defined perimeters. This asymmetric scenario generates a dangerous cyber arms race where national investments focus more on aggressive tools and attackers than on defense technologies. Two emerging factors – integration of cyber-attacks with artificial intelligence and the diffusion of smart devices and autonomous vehicles – are creating an even more risky battleground where cyber security will permeate social safety. This paper analyzes the main cyber capabilities and actors involved in the past, present and visible future cyber landscape.