The ready availability of strong encryption providing cover for terrorists has been well publicized, in the context of Facebook’s WhatsApp for example, but it is also being exploited across the wider cybercrime community to hinder protection against a wide variety of attacks. This was a key finding of Cisco’s 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, which also identified “noise” associated with a variety of commonly used internet utilities such as drop boxes as a cover for various attacks, because they make it harder for defenses to separate real threats from all the background activity. Cisco’s report almost coincided with Akamai’s Q4 2017 State of the Internet Security survey, with at first sight surprisingly little overlap between them. Cisco’s combined data and analysis…