According to Verizon’s Data Breach studies into industrial espionage attacks against the private sector, the volume of nation-state actors increased from being 12% of the perpetrators of such attacks in 2018, to 23% in the 2019 study and to 38% in the 2020 study. There’s no escaping the fact that nation-states are increasingly engaged in hacking.
Indeed, from what I’ve witnessed as a cybersecurity consultant, nation states are getting ever better at hiding; so the extent of their engagement could even be higher. State hackers use various techniques such as acting through proxy layers/actors, avoiding attribution by manipulating data, using clever toolkits and other means to mislead forensic analysts (sometimes by imitating other nation-states or criminal actors).
Perhaps it’s because attribution is becoming ever harder to stick, that certain nation-state actors have become bolder in their attacks and have begun to target critical infrastructure.
Deadly consequences?
When in the past, nation-state hacking goals were intelligence, influence, disinformation, propaganda, industrial and political espionage, the spread today also includes a troubling shift towards using cyber-attacks on real world critical infrastructure that aim to hurt or even kill citizens of the target countries.
From April to July 2020 Israel's water supplies were threatened three times by a nation-state actor, suspected to be Iran. The industrial controls of Israeli water processing facilities were attacked in an attempt to alter the injection of treatment chemicals to unsafe levels and the attack was so disconcerting, a cyber counter attack was levied against the Iranians (allegedly initiated by Israel) that disrupted port traffic at the Port of Shahid Rajaee.
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