Cyber Security as a Threat to the USA Essay

Cyber Security as a Threat to the USA Essay

Instructions/Descriptions

Cyberspace has the potential of becoming the theatres of warfare in the 21st century. Future battles will be diverse from the traditional ones that were fought on land, water and air. When a country initiates internet based and invisible force as an instrument of fight against another country it is argued to be a cyber-warfare.

Some of the features of cyber warfare may include hacking of government and organizations critical data, webpages, strategic controls and intelligences. In 2014 there was a six month long cyber-attack on German parliament and another example of the 2008 attack of the USA military computers.

Cyber security is therefore an issue that needs global urgency in the global media. Cyber security alludes to a framework whose primary focus is on the protection of computer programs, data, and networks (Swine, n.d.). Cyber security mechanisms protect organizational and personal data from unauthorized access, destructions, and unintended access.

Government agencies, militaries, and health care facilities, financial institutions, and many other organizations tend to gather, process, and store confidential information in their operating systems and networks. With the growing sophistication and escalations of the numbers of cyber insecurity cases such as hacking, cyber security issues remain as one of the most threatening risks facing the united states of America for various reasons, as discussed in the essay.

There have been multiple cases of data loss that have led to substantial adverse implications to the clients and organizations such as in the banking sectors in the United States. All the government agencies, including the defense forces, faces higher risks of data loss and theft of critical information or their critical data being accessed by unauthorized individuals and can be further used f to perpetrate crimes and unintended purposes.

One of the memorable attacks on the USA government infrastructure includes the SCADA attacks. The attackers accessed the frameworks of a seller of SCADA control frameworks and utilized the accumulated information to execute further assaults.

The gathered data could have been potentially utilized in tapping the utilization of the default ids and passwords to assault and devastate the Illinois water siphon frameworks (“Russian hackers behind first successful US SCADA system attack,” 2011). The water pump was remotely activated and burnt through a redundant system.

This attack was similar to the one in Massachusetts, which exploited bugs in the open software phpmyadmin. We cannot understate the impacts of data breaches at Equifax as data was stolen even from places that were believed to be most secure.

The data breach at Equifax led to the loss of data for millions of USA citizens, such as security numbers, credit card information’s, PINS, and credit information. The breach occurred for almost three months without being detected, with over 146 million people losing their critical data.

Netflix utilized AWS cloud administrations, with the two having created perfect connections (“9 Spectacular Cloud Computing Fails,” 2015). The Netflix spilling administrations were developing at a quicker rate than the firm capacity to keep up them with the accessible IT assets.

Amazon had noteworthy difficulties in its distributed computing administrations, which was the fundamental explanation behind Netflix to go down during the Christmas day. The Netflix blackouts were so broad advanced with numerous clients filling their objections, contending that amazon administrations were down as it affected such a significant number of individuals and seemingly setting the whole endeavor cloud development a few stages back.

Another significant cloud comes up short happened in Cloud Flare, which is a security and cloud getting administration. During the way toward overhauling the Cloudflare switches, which was done at the same time, the switch smashed.

As the firm was including a layer between 785 000 administrations and their clients to accelerate the traffic and relieve instances of ddos assaults and other security challenges, the entirety of the 785,000 sites were adversely affected.

The above are just examples that depict the fact that the United States of America is a significant target for cyber attackers. In the era of increased data mining and data explosion, most organizations are overwhelmed by massive information that flows through their information systems, with most organizations having inadequate mechanisms of guaranteeing safety for such data (“Cyber security essay for students and children,” 2019).

It is worth to note that most hackers are technology buffs and keep updating themselves with the emerging technologies and diverse aspects of the computers form programming to the coding to be prepared to hack any system.

Evolution and increased sophistication in the cyber-attacks such as ransomware strategies evolving can cost the US firm billions of dollars in case they are able el to access and kidnap an individual or organization database such as government agencies. Crypto-jacking whereby criminals are hijacking work computers to mine for Cryptocurrencies.

The United States is not immune to cyber-physical attacks as the hackers are increasingly targeting electrical grids, transport systems, water treatment facilities, and military departments, and so on. We cannot understate the dangers of state-sponsored attacks, which is a significant cyber security issue that faces the United States of America (Kali, 2019).

Besides the hackers seeking to make profits through access and theft of personal data, entire nations and states are using their cyber skills to infiltrate other governments and perpetrate attacks on their critical infrastructures.

State-sponsored attacks mainly target the government-run systems and infrastructures, such as in the security forces with the USA expected to face such a challenge form countries like China, which can significantly impact its government processes.

As the internet of things is turning out to be more ubiquitous, it is expected that more than 75 billion devices will be connected to the Iot by 2025. It is, therefore, insightful to argue that most of the transactions and operations in the developed nations, including the USA, will be done through computers, and hence cyber security will be the greatest threat that the countries will be experiencing.

People’s data will increasingly become vulnerable as medical care facilities, government agencies, education institutions, and business organizations abandon paperwork and embrace computerized data storage mechanisms (Brenner, 2013). Digitalization of transaction and government operations is providing the hackers with vast opportunities of exploiting any available vulnerabilities.

People are increasingly diverting from traditional crimes such as terrorism and armed robberies to smart means of achieving their goals. For instance, perpetuating a cybercrime would be viewed to be safer and compared to stealing physical commodities as individuals Ca part away with billions of dollars and remain anonymous and hence is attractive to most youths and elites (Brenner, 2013).

Cybercrimes can be done regardless of geographical barriers and police surveillances, making cyber security issues the next major challenge that the government will be facing in the near future. It would, therefore, be easier to engage in social engineering and hacking as the number of graduate’s increases with the increasing levels of unemployment.

The state government is struggling to hire enough and qualified experts who can assist in effectively curbing the threats of rising cyber insecurity. The shortage of skilled workforces in the government and organizations is a cause for alarm since the smart and digitized workforce is essential in combating the more sophisticated and evolving cyber security threats.

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It would be critical for the state government to ensure that it takes measures to equip its workforce with the emerging technologies and data security mechanisms, which can aid in mitigating the imminent cyber threats that face the government infrastructures (Brenner, 2013).

There are multiple ways through which the state government can mitigate the rising dangers of cyber security issues, including ensuring that all data is encrypted, such as in the transit. Ensuring that the organizations are using the latest information communication systems such as computers that have modernized features.

There should be an effective defense against the advanced and persistent threats at multiple levels, which is possible through installations of multi anti-malware scanners, which will efficiently scan archives with various antivirus engines through combinations of signatures and heuristics hence increase capabilities of detecting more threats.

Through continuous monitoring of the devices for abnormal activities, the management would be enabled to detect unusual traffic through scanning with multiple antiviruses and an updated signature database that can detect viruses that were previously undetected (Swine, n.d.).

Regular penetration testing’s coupled with vulnerability assessments would be critical in gathering realistic inputs on the general security levels and offer insights on areas that need additional security improvements.

We cannot understate the criticality of the physical security control measure in mitigation of such threats which may include use of stronger passwords, restricting access only to specific areas surveillances, using intrusion detection systems, heat sensors and smolder sensors, testing coupled with strict policies on safeguarding critical information among employees.

In conclusion, obey security threats are on the rise as the numbers of graduates increase with increased levels of unemployment in the USA and other nations. Cybercriminal such as hackers is continually equipping themselves with emerging skills and technologies which make cybercrimes more complex.

As the world continues to embrace cloud computing services in the era of big data, cyber security will be the next big challenge as past events of data breaches in the United States offers insight that they can still occur again if appropriate security measures to safeguard data are not implemented. It is therefore advisable for the USA government to unite with other governments in fighting this common enemy since it is turning out to be a global pandemic.

References

9 Spectacular Cloud Computing Fails. (2015, July 15). Retrieved from https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/9-spectacular-cloud-computing-fails/d/d-id/1321305?Image_number=4

Brenner, J. (2013). Glass houses: Privacy, secrecy, and cyber insecurity in a transparent world. Penguin.

Cyber security essay for students and children. (2019, September 16). Toppr-guides. Https://www.toppr.com/guides/essays/cyber-security-essay/

Kali, K. (2019). Cyber security: A starter guide to cyber security for beginners, discover the best strategies for defense your devices, including risk management, social engineering, and information security.

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Russian hackers behind first successful US SCADA system attack. (2011, November 21). Retrieved from https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/russian-hackers-behind-first-successful-us-scada/

Swinhoe, D. (n.d.). The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century. CSO Online. Https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html

Cyber Security as a Threat to the USA Essay

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