When it comes to defending against foreign cyber powers, many U.S. national security experts tend to hype up countries with powerful hacking capabilities, such as China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
Regarding state-sponsored malware campaigns, though, the security community needs to dig deeper, says Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and programmer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“We’ve found lots of countries now are starting to get hacking programs. It’s a lot of countries you wouldn’t expect,” Quintin said Friday during CyberTalks, a virtual event produced by Scoop News Group. “We’ve seen state-sponsored malware coming out of Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Ethiopia, and all sorts of countries that haven’t previously been well known for their hacking capabilities.”