Americans are at risk of being dragged into global cyber warfare, FireEye's CEO warns: 'It's as simple as if you can be hacked, you are hacked'
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Americans are at risk of being dragged into cyber attacks that would put their connected devices at risk, according to the
Kevin Mandia, the CEO of cybersecurity company FireEye, told "Axios on HBO" on Sunday that future cyber warfare between the US and China or Russia could impact regular citizens, leading to widespread disruptions to daily life.
"Apps won't work. Appliances may not work. People don't even know all the things they depend on," Mandia said. "All of a sudden, the supply chain starts getting disrupted because computers don't work.""It's as simple as if you can be hacked, you are hacked," he said.
Mandia's company, FireEye, was the first to notice the massive SolarWinds security breach last year, which FireEye discovered when its own systems were hacked.SolarWinds, a Texas-based IT firm, was the subject of a cyberattack went undetected for months - as a result of the hack, foreign attackers were able to spy on private companies as well as government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
According to SolarWinds, up to 18,000 of its customers may have been vulnerable to the attack.Families in Houston and Chicago reported similar experiences of hackers infiltrating their cameras and thermostats.
A family in Northern California also discovered their Nest camera had been infiltrated when it began playing a message about North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles headed toward US cities.
In December of the same year, hackers broke into a Tennessee family's Ring indoor security camera and terrorized their 8-year-old daughter.These users were likely vulnerable to hacking because they had recycled passwords that had previously been exposed in another data breach or didn't have two-factor authentication enabled for their devices.
While hacked connected devices like security cameras have produced some of the more frightening breaches in recent years, as Mandia highlighted, almost anything that can be hacked will be hacked.
Experts told Insider's Aaron Holmes that the pandemic has made consumers particularly vulnerable to attacks as they seek out health information."Criminal groups and threat actors are using COVID-19 largely as a lure in order to hook their victims and get an initial foothold into a target organization," David Emm, a security researcher at Kapersky, told Insider. "For attackers, it's the gift that keeps on giving because here are so many aspects of it that they can latch onto."
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