The Cuban communications monopoly, Etecsa, revealed This Saturday that its cybersecurity experts recorded 2,600 incidents from January to September 2023, including numerous attacks and “complex intrusions” on banking and government servers, which are characterized by “the use of unauthorized systems and devices to share data that have a confidential nature”.
Daniel Ramos, Business Director of Etecsa, assured that most of the attacks have to do with “the sending and receiving of spam emails, malicious traffic generated by malicious code, scans of services and exploitation of vulnerabilities that have compromised websites and other computer elements”.
However, the official said he feels calm about the future of cybersecurity in the country: a battalion of engineers has been training for several years at the University of Computer Science (UCI), with a subject plan that will train them to become a digital elite. with one objective: to wage war on “cybercriminals” with a spoonful of their own medicine, Artificial Intelligence (AI), among other tools they use for their “criminal purposes,” he assured.
“Human error is one of the main causes of cyber incidents in (state) entities,” lamented Ramos.
“Human error is one of the main causes of cyber incidents in (state) entities,” lamented Ramos. The cause: “violations of information security policies by those responsible for computer security and the users of these technologies.”
In addition, he noted, in “work devices” – computers and telephones tankers of staff and workers, subsidized by the Government – ”weak passwords” are used and it is common for “staff to visit unsafe websites.”
Some 8.4 million Cubans have an internet connection, which also makes them vulnerable to threats, Ramos alleged. 70% of the cybersecurity “incidents” recorded by Etecsa refer to “cyberbullying, identity theft and scams through digital social networks and electronic payment channels” such as Transfermóvil and EnZona, Ramos explained.
Etecsa considers cybersecurity as an indispensable condition for the banking process guided by the authorities in August 2023. Without “high levels of security in the technological organizations involved” there will be no banking, the official warned. Ramos also asked for a “permanent update” of the laws on telecommunications in Cuba.
The Etecsa manager, who referred to the Cuban servers as a victim of “cyber enemies”, did not say a word about the complaints from international cybersecurity companies, which have warned about the intensification, since 2019, of information manipulation campaigns that Several governments – including that of Cuba – have put it at the center of their political agenda.
The proliferation of anonymous profiles, the generation of images and videos with AI and the dissemination of false content are some of the activities that characterize the work of these internet groups.
The proliferation of anonymous profiles, the generation of images and videos with AI and the dissemination of false content are some of the activities that characterize the work of these internet groups, related to the regime of the Island and the Governments of Russia, China , Iran, Mexico, Argentina or El Salvador and, in addition, with organizations from Ethiopia, Indonesia and Ecuador, according to the American company Mandiant.
Although Mandiant does not reveal to what extent the Cuban regime is involved in the financing of these groups, its report takes as an example one of the false profiles created by a group related to the Government of Havana. The technique, they detail, is the recreation of a face digitally altered to make it look like the profile of a real person.
For more than a decade, activists have pointed to the UCI as the origin of these campaigns. Even the testimonies of graduates of that center confirm the hypothesis that students, among their teaching tasks, must carry out hacking tasks and denial of service attacks on dissident sites, techniques that are now learned professionally, as Ramos explained, in the recent UCI Cybersecurity race.
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