...Internet, by far is the best innovation man has ever created. In the initial days, communication was made by verbal or non verbal cues, even if people stayed far away from each other. Later came letters, which could be sent to the near and dears. With the world progressing so rapidly, people became closer than they ever were before, and came along a great invention made by Graham Bell, the telephone. With telephone in the back of the mind, communication stream further widened to include Internet. Internet has become the best tool for communication. People communicate via email, chat, voice and video chat (the recent addition to the ever increasing resources provided by internet). It provides a wealth of knowledge. Information on any kind of subject is made available in a few seconds over the internet, ranging from shopping to government, business to entertainment, and so on. It has become easier to establish relationships with people from different backgrounds, culture and location. People can sit at home, and learn about another country, their religion, language, way of living, etc without ever visiting the place. Internet proves to be the most helpful tool for all fields. Students use the internet almost always, to study and conduct research for their courses. Doctors and medical students use the web to publish their research papers, findings, different technologies, and cures for various diseases. Cyber attack is a crime that most people do not report When...
Words: 1220 - Pages: 5
...Catastrophic Cyberattack on the Health System Over the couple decades the United States has taken on using more of the information technology systems. By doing this helps with sharing information quickly and efficiently. One of the changes that have come into this cyber system is the United States health care system. When it comes to a person’s health care having the information quickly can make a difference in a life. At the same time there are potential risks when sharing this kind of information over an internet connection. Cyber-terrorism meaning is “an assault on electronic communication networks” (Dictionary.com. n.d. para. 1). If this happens to our health care system, the persons responsible could access information that is private. This happened to one hospital located in Bakersfield, California. The hospital was him with a virus attack that crippled the computer system. So the doctors and nurses at this hospital had to go back to using paper records for the patients. Attacks like this can be costly. It can cause delays in surgeries, important test results and cause the care to patients to be interrupted (UCDavis Health System, 2010). With the health care systems moving into a digital world seems like a great idea. Back in 1999-2001 the health records of a service member and their family was done on paper. Every time a service member would move to a different base they had to go get those records and carry them to their next duty station. When I left...
Words: 1047 - Pages: 5
...Cyberattacks: What Should America Do To Stop Them? Eric Gilliam Colorado Technical University Cyberattacks: What Should America Do To Stop Them? In the past few years, Cyberattacks have increased more than any cyber expert could have expected. Hackers and nation state sponsored attacks have risen about forty eight percent in 2014. America needs to do something now, before it gets worse. If we do not find a way to put a stop to these Cyberattacks hacker could essentially destroy our financial infrastructure. If this was to happen there would be no plastic to use for payment. Cyberattacks are here to stay. We need the help from ethical hackers to police the Cyberattacks world. When you watch the news, you hear about Cyberattacks on a daily basis. What you probably did not realize is “Cyberattacks cost business about 2.7 Million dollars per business” (White, 2014) per business. Cyberattacks are increasing and it is something we all need to look at. When this article came out, there were about 117,339 Cyberattacks every day. Now Cybercriminals are targeting mid-range businesses because larger businesses have increased their security. Cyberattacks can take down anything hackers want to destroy. “The UK National Security Strategy says that there is real risk. Attacks in cyberspace can have a potentially devastating real-world effect. Government, military, industrial and economic targets, including critical services” (Ncube, 2016), for example, hospitals or transportation...
Words: 516 - Pages: 3
...“Anonymous” Attack Cyber Incident On April 24, 2014, the Boston Children’s Hospital reported they had been under a cyberattack from an unknown source for the previous four days. This paper will focus on the details of the cyber security incident, the impact of the attack, the consequences, and a brief explanation of the mitigation steps the hospital has taken post incident. The Boston Children’s Hospital was a victim of a cyberattack between the dates of April 20 and April 25, 2014. The cyberattack on the hospital focused on bringing down the hospital’s internal website – used by hospital personnel to check appointments, test results, and other patient information (Wen, 2014). The hackers used a distributed denial of service approach attack, which consisted of a bombardment of traffic to the hospitals web page, causing it to crash and become unusable to all hospital staff. The hospital has insisted that no patient data or information has been compromised due to these cyberattacks (Farrell, 2014). Law enforcement was notified of the attacks, but it is unconfirmed whether investigations were started. It is suspected the attackers were a part of the well-known hacker network “Anonymous”. Even though no evidence exists to prove this group is behind the attack on the Children’s Hospital, the incident has all the markings of a typical Anonymous cyberattack. The group typically targets Internet pages of large organizations and cripples them by with a barrage of traffic (Wen...
Words: 979 - Pages: 4
...currently there is ongoing work on development of a robot called Loyal Partner, which will be armed with remote-controlled weapons and be able to manoeuvre in terrain, serving as an advance guard for combat soldiers. It could be deployed into areas filled with hidden explosives and shooting ambushes. On one hand, the deployment of robots can solve the problem of human resources, but on the other hand the legislative field of use of robotics as warfare is not established yet. There still a long way to go. As one of the first steps that should be done in order to arrange the legislation in case of cyber warfare, could be extension of existing international agreements to protect civilians against cyberattacks. Those international agreements should be made so that certain acts like cyberattacks on civilian infrastructure are prohibited. And it should be the country’s responsibility to take measures in protection of its infrastructure. As one of the big steps in making cyberspace to a more safe space could be establishing the mechanism of national governmental responsibility for the prevention of violations originating within a nation’s borders, and an obligation to assist in stopping and investigating...
Words: 1548 - Pages: 7
...An attack against a computer system or network is how PC Magazine defines a cyber-attack. A Cyber-attack can take many forms, for many reasons and can be executed on a small or large scale. Most cyber-attacks are criminal in nature. These cybercrimes are usually motivated by profit. Recent examples include the cyber-attacks on Visa/MasterCard and attacks on Google’s network by China. The cyber-attacks on Visa and MasterCard were part of “operation payback”, and were carried out by various loose nit groups that organized using social networking sites. “Operation payback” was retaliation against Visa and MasterCard for refusing to continue to do business with the website WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks posted leaked classified U.S. diplomatic communications on their website for the world to see. The United States felt this was a criminal act and pressured Visa and MasterCard to stop processing transactions for WikiLeaks. In response hackers launch “operation payback” which used distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to crash Visa and MasterCard Servers. Google recently exited the Chinese market. According to the New York Times, “Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyber-attacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attacks were directed at some 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley, California, according to people with knowledge of...
Words: 2021 - Pages: 9
...During Operation Allied Force Introduction. With the increasing number of cyberattacks, many security professionals are greatly troubled by the real threat to the information technology infrastructure in the United States. While safeguarding information has been a major issue for the private and public sectors since the beginning of the computer era, the increased level of concern over the most recent attacks has resulted in devoting more resources to combat this threat. This paper analyzes numerous cyberattacks by Russian computer enthusiast group Chaos Hackers Crew and other hacktivists during Operation Allied Force in 1999, that included taking down and defacing various NATO and US Government websites, several successful virus propagation attempts on military servers and countless spamming storms. This particular case raises curious questions about the legal definition of term cyberconflict itself, magnitude of the damage from a potential cyberattack on U.S. Government by terrorists and the level of preparedness of key military and intelligence units for the cyberwar. The cyberterrorism threat is real, however it’s essential to recognize that preserving the state of continuous distress over computer vulnerabilities can be profitable. Based on this research, cultural differences play a huge role in the world of computer hackers who decide what entity to attack and how, also the scale of a cyberattack doesn’t matter as economic damage can be devastating regardless of its size...
Words: 8586 - Pages: 35
...Leblanc, S. P., & Partington, A. (2011). An overview of cyber-attack and computer network operations simulation. Proceedings from MMS ’11: Military Modeling & Simulation Symposium. Boston, MA. Maughan, D. (2010, February). The need for a national cybersecurity research and development agenda. Communications of the ACM, 53(2), 29-31. Write a four to five (4-5) page paper in which you: 1. Identify at least three (3) benefits or key knowledge points that could be derived from using cyber-attack simulator systems and research, and suggest how this insight could assist in defining the needs for security within an organization. 2. Analyze and determine which sector, public or private, has greater insight on the potential of cyberattacks. Justify your answer by citing at least three (3) examples. 3. Suggest at least four (4) best practices that should be implemented when developing a cybersecurity strategy within a security enterprise. Then, evaluate the required...
Words: 1615 - Pages: 7
...Estonia Banks Targeted University of Maryland University College CSEC 620 Individual assignment # 2 Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 3 Estonia under attack……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 Types of attacks ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 5 Threats actors and their motives ……………………………………………………………………………. 6 Who were responsible for the attacks ……………………………………………………………………. 7 Strategic Shifts in Response to attacks ……………………………………………………………………. 8 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 10 Introduction The Baltic state of Estonia was attacked by hackers in April of 2007. Scores of government and private sector website were shut down. Estonian’s daily activities, such as pumping gas or making withdrawals from ATM machines were severely impacted. The architecture of the Internet allowed networks of bots, called botnets, to direct millions of packets to the servers of the Estonian targets, overloading and rendering them inaccessible to visitors. Digital traffic from servers ranging all the way to Peru, Vietnam and the United States overwhelmed Estonian websites, overloading their buffers with superfluous data. At the apex of this DDoS flooding, government websites that had been receiving 1,000 visits each day were suddenly inundated with 2,000 per second (Crouch, Pg 1). No overt financial motivations were discovered as the driver of these attacks, with the principal motivation being political...
Words: 2634 - Pages: 11
...instance, and its telecommunications networks — the military here (and elsewhere) sees disruptive software as an essential new tool of war. According to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the 15 countries with the biggest military budgets are all investing in offensive cyber capabilities. The latest step occurred last month when the United States sent out bids for technologies “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, corrupt or usurp” an adversary’s attempt to use cyberspace for advantage. The Air Force asked for proposals to plan for and manage cyberwarfare, including the ability to launch superfast computer attacks and withstand retaliation. The United States, China, Russia, Britain and Israel began developing basic cyberattack capabilities at least a decade ago and are still figuring out how to integrate them into their military operations. Experts say cyberweapons will be used before or during conflicts involving conventional weapons to infect an adversary’s network and disrupt a target, including shutting down military communications. The most prominent example is the Stuxnet virus deployed in 2010 by the...
Words: 492 - Pages: 2
...Home Depot Data Breach Background on the 2014 Home Depot Data Breach Home depot was the target of a cyberattack on their information system infrastructure that lasted from April of 2014 to September of 2014. As a result of the attack and following data breach, 56 million credit-card accounts and 53 million email addresses were stolen. (“Home Depot Hackers Exposed 53 Million Email Addresses”) The cyberattack involved several steps. First, the attackers gained third party credentials allowing them into the system. Next they exploited an unknown weakness in the system that allowed for the attackers to elevate their own access privileges. Finally, they installed malware on Home Depot’s self-checkout systems in the U.S. and Canada, allowing for the data to be stolen. Because this was a multistage attack, there were several stages of failures. While this shows that there were multiple lines of defense, the fact that there were multiple failures as well is a large issue. It demonstrations that even with multiple lines of defense Home Depot was still not adequately protected. The first failure was that the attackers acquired credentials from a third party vendor. This may not have been Home Depot’s fault directly, but there are still governance processes they could’ve employed to prevent it. Once the attackers were in the system they exploited yet another vulnerability that allowed themselves to elevate their access rights. The third vulnerability that was exploited was the lack of...
Words: 2954 - Pages: 12
...especially for big corporations such as Sony. This data breach all started on November 24th, 2014 when Sony realized they were becoming a victim of a high profile studio wide cyberattack. A cyberattack is when a company has unauthorized people or computers accessing protected files and information. For a big corporation like Sony you can imagine this caused a big uproar and got the public’s attention. The cyberattack was traced back to a group that called itself #GOP or the Guardians of Peace. This group of hackers is supposedly from North Korea which does not makes this situation any better. There were a number of things Sony was worried about be accessed, such as unreleased movies, employee information, customer information, and other sensitive material. The first step of this hacking process involved GOP illegally acquiring a valid digital certificate from Sony. After gaining access to the company from this certificate, GOP was then able to release a malicious software called Destover, which sneaks into the systems and takes over, giving access to the data. After that Sony’s next move was to immediately blacklist that copy of the digital certificate, so if it were to be used again it would be flagged as malware and not allowed passed the other security measures. While Sony has currently curbed the cyberattacks there is no way for them to get back the hundreds of terabytes of data already stolen. What happened next was devastating for Sony Pictures. There were a number of unreleased...
Words: 3014 - Pages: 13
... from the comfort of your own home or office, exfiltrate information electronically from somebody else’s computer around the world without the expense and risk of trying to grow a spy.” On November 15, 2007, the bipartisan, congressionally chartered U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) put a finer point on it: “Chinese espionage activities in the United States are so extensive that they comprise the single greatest risk to the security of American technolo- gies.” Cyberpenetration is by far China’s most effective espionage tool, and it is one that China’s spy agencies use against America’s allies almost as much as against U.S. targets. Targeting America. The U.S. military has been the primary target of Chinese cyberattacks, followed closely by the Departments of State, Commerce, and Homeland Security. Academic, industrial, defense, and financial databases are also vulnerable. Regrettably, American...
Words: 8993 - Pages: 36
...Preventative Measures There are a lot of things you can do today to keep yourself safe from harm from cyberattacks. While these options won’t completely eliminate all the risk associated with online security, they are a good starting ground to make it harder for the criminals to access your info. To begin, create strong passwords that are unique for each website so that you do not leave all accounts vulnerable by creating the same password for all. Shopping online also brings up a lot of vulnerabilities since hackers could obtain your financial information through the online stores if they have significant flaws in their online security. Having just one credit card for online purchases greatly reduces the risk of losing your financial data. Phishing scams use fraudulent emails and fake websites that masquerade as legitimate businesses, to lure unsuspecting users into revealing private login information. It is very important to make certain that the websites you visit are legitimate. New technology improvements in anti-virus software allow for better protection which is why it is necessary for everyone to stay up to date on the newest anti-virus software. Other security patches offered by your web browser also add a layer of protection. With the increase of mobile devices such as laptops and tablets, there are a number of risks using your device in public spots with unsecured wireless connections. It also makes it easier for people passing by to view your screen. A private wifi...
Words: 325 - Pages: 2
...Michael Torres Hacker group research Deep Panda This hacking group appears to be sponsored by the Chinese government. It has been tied to several successful attacks in the last year. The security firm Crowd Strike named them Deep Panda. The hacker’s latest work may have been the massive Anthem data breach, which exposed the personal information of more than 80 million insurance policyholders. The cyberattack puts Anthem customers at risk for identity theft throughout their lives, and exposed many to subsequent phishing attacks from fraudsters around the world. Deep Panda has been tied to cyberattacks on U.S. foreign policy think tanks and individuals who are experts on the Middle East and Australian media outlets. A 2014 investigation by Crowd Strike also blamed the group for sending malware to organizations across the U.S. defense, healthcare and technology sectors. Deep Panda is considered one of the most sophisticated hacking groups operating today. Just last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned the cybersecurity community that the group represents a threat. “This group uses a wide variety of tools including generic hacking utilities in order to gain access, establish persistent network access, and move laterally though the victim network,” an FBI official stated in a memo. Flying Kitten This Iran-based hacker group has been in Crowd Strike's sites since mid-January, and is best known for targeting a number of US-based defense contractors and Iranian...
Words: 338 - Pages: 2
