Industry leaders are scrambling to address the issue, which will take new thinking to overcome.
This year, the US government paid out its largest bug bounty yet — during the government-run “Hack the Air Force” program — for a vulnerability in its software. The flaw, if not proactively found, would have allowed hackers to run malicious code on its systems and manipulate data. It’s the latest example of an emerging threat that has industry leaders scrambling and requires new thinking from security professionals.
Former national intelligence chief James Clapper warned as early as 2015 that “the next push of the envelope” in cyber warfare was likely to involve data manipulation. Now, financial services companies, healthcare organizations, and other industries in which data integrity is critical to business are running cyber war games to figure out how to prepare for such threats.
