If you are familiar with the word "Armageddon" , you will understand that this word refers to an apocalyptic phenomenon that, at the time of this event, the inhabitants of the earth will experience chaos and chaos. Cybergeddon is also derived from the word Armageddon, which refers to the great cyber chaos. An event beyond the scale of a cyber war. This newly emerging term was first used by cybersecurity researchers and experts during the 2010s. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2012, Ashar Aziz, the CEO of Fire-Eye, considered this term to be only a possibility, but James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, in the summer of 2015, reported the possibility of Cybergeddon.
Behzad Qasemi, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and founder of Overclock Cybersecurity Lab, has a different view on this issue. Qasemi believes that; Maybe earlier, for the occurrence of organized cyber attacks, we considered definitions such as: cyber war, cyber attacks, or electronic war, but today we are facing a high probability of an incident called Cybergeddon. An event that has far more destructive power than other cyber damages.
Behzad Qasemi describes Cybergeddon as follows: cyber attacks and wars are generally engineered and executed by organizations, groups or individuals and have a specific destruction power, even the largest organized cyber attacks can be defined by the destruction factor and the time of restoration and optimization for them. But the Cybergeddon phenomenon will not be like that. Perhaps, in the first place, to define the level of this issue, he pointed out that it is similar to wider attacks organized by several countries, which is also wrong. Cybergeddon can also happen like Armageddon. A phenomenon that is beyond human control and is caused by system errors. Artificial intelligence and machine learning give self-organization to computer ecosystems based on machine learning. This ability will include the possibility of providing a higher level of access to the system itself. If we take our point of view from Cybergeddon for organized human purposes and take a deeper look at this issue with a more open view, we will not consider Cybergeddon specific to human attacks, but the machines themselves will have the ability to disrupt cyber order. If we consider this possibility free of paranoia and pessimism, by mixing this possibility with the amount of technical logic and examining events such as the hacking of gas stations in the Iran in 2021 or the discovery of the decentralized malware "Cerber" by the Cybersecurity Laboratory of Harvard University, we can be a little more serious. This issue was treated as a cyber threat. Decentralized cyber ecosystems, which are welcomed by a large number of organizations and companies today, are more exposed to such incidents due to their decentralized structure and low level of control and human access. The US Defense Technical Intelligence Center had mentioned nuclear electromagnetic pulse attacks as part of the military action that might cause cybergeddon, but how should we deal with it if we imagine that the systems suffer a systemic failure?
The increase of cyber attacks is the news of the coming of Cybergeddon
New research by the Overclock Cybersecurity Laboratory showed that cyber attacks on world governments have increased in the first few months of 2023. In a recently published study by Overclock Labs, the lab analyzed 924 major cyber incidents that occurred between 2006 and the first quarter of 2023. The analysis of these statistics has shown that during this period, at least 722 cyber attacks have been carried out against government organizations. However, prior to 2020, government agencies reported an average of 29 cyber attacks per year. After 2020, the number of attacks increased to an annual average of 96. Almost half of the 924 major events analyzed occurred in the past three years. Oftentimes, malicious agents have started their attack with social engineering and ended with malware or ransomware attacks. However, these attacks have sometimes been misrepresented by information campaigns and media outlets.