Rogue governments are increasingly buying “off the shelf” hacking attacks, according to Google’s security chief, making it easier and cheaper for them to launch cyber attacks.
Heather Adkins, director of information privacy and security at Google, made the remarks at a conference in San Francisco on Monday. While state-sponsored cyber attacks were nothing new, she said, the number of incursions was rising.
“What I see increasing trendwise is the attack platforms are no longer something they need to build themselves, they can buy it off the shelf,” said Ms Adkins. As a result, smaller governments were able to launch cyber attacks inexpensively, without having to assemble their own teams of hackers, she said.