WASHINGTON \u2014 The North Korean cyber hit on the network of Sony Entertainment in November is hardly the first state-sponsored bit of corporate hacking to strike the US or its allies, and experts say it is likely a harbinger of things to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This is a whole new day in cyber for a host of reasons,” Mike Rogers, <\/span>former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers <\/span>told an audience at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington on Jan. 15. <\/span>Not least of which is that the United States “is going to have to show nation states that it will not tolerate it.”<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n But how to respond is the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US government has publicly blamed North Korea for the hack, which is assumed to have come in retaliation for the release of “The Interview,” a Sony’s movie in which two bumbling Americans assassinate the north’s dictator, Kim Jong-un.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the biggest implications of the attack is that “we now know that a nation with 1,000th<\/span> of the [gross domestic product] GDP <\/span>of the United States has the sophistication to carry out such an attack,” added Paul Stockton, <\/span>former assistant defense secretary for of defense of <\/span>homeland defense and Americas’ security affairsDr. Paul Stockton<\/span><\/span>.<\/b><\/span><\/span> “The trend is one way and that is toward nations obtaining increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities.”<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n While Sony will likely surely eventually <\/span>pay a large <\/span>price for the hack from shareholders and industry partners, the breach has hardly been the most worrisome of corporate hacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In August 2012, it is widely suspected that Iran breached the internal network of the Saudi oil giant Aramco, an event that inserted a virus dubbed “Shamoon” into the system, which replaced the data on hard drives with an image of a burning American flag and erasing previously stored <\/span>information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The hackers called the erasing mechanism implanted on the network “Wiper,” which was suspected as being a sly nod to a component contained in “Flame,” a virus that struck Iranian oil companies that May, forcing them to cut the Internet connection to the Kharg Island oil terminal, a critical spigot through which about 80 percent of Iran’s oil flows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n American officials have also blamed Iran for the September 2012 cyber attacks that took<\/span> the websites of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, US Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC offline for several days, blocking access for customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More seriously, the German government recently reported that a spear phishing attack on an unnamed German factory last year caused massive physical damage. In a report released in January, the Bonn government admitted that one of the plant’s blast furnaces could not be shut down, resulting in “massive damage to plant.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n But hackers don’t need to go after the Aramcos and Sonys of the world in order to cause disruption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “All you have to do is go after the supply chain,” said Rogers, pointing out that a nation-state could do damage to US defense prime contractors by targeting their smaller, more easily hackable suppliers, effectively shutting down programs or stealing information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Chinese government has already been extremely <\/span>active in that regard, having hacked into US networks in order to pilfer information about a whole host of weapons systems from the Patriot missile system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD; and the Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n