The increasing proliferation and complexity of technology are creating new "opportunities" for cyber criminals to exploit. In addition, cyber crime techniques are getting ever more sophisticated. For businesses, this adds up to an increasingly more dangerous cyber threat environment. It doesn't help that human factors add to the risk. These include simple blunders, such as exposing sensitive data to the open Internet, as well as network security misconceptions and oversights. Here are two network security mistakes that invite devastating data breaches:
Believing Hackers Won't Find or Aren't Interested in You
For a large school of fish dealing with a single predator, there is safety in numbers. Businesses that underestimate the risk of a data
In December 2013, Target was attacked by a cyber-attack due to a data breach. Target is a widely known retailer that has millions of consumers flocking every day to the retailer to partake in the stores wonders. The Target Data Breach is now known as the largest data breach/attack surpassing the TJX data breach in 2007. “The second-biggest attack struck TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshall’s, which said in 2007 that about 45 million credit cards and debit cards had been compromised.” (Timberg, Yang, & Tsukayama, 2013) The data breach occurred to Target was a strong swift kick to the guts to not only the retailer/corporation, but to employees and consumers. The December 2013 data breach, exposed Target in a way that many would not expect to see and happen to any major retailer/corporation.
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling is a book that focuses on the events that occurred on and led up to the AT&T long-distance telephone switching system crashing on January 15, 1990. Not only was this event rare and unheard of it took place in a time when few people knew what was exactly going on and how to fix the problem. There were a lot of controversies about the events that led up to this event and the events that followed because not only did it happen on Martin Luther King Day, but few knew what the situation truly entailed. There was fear, skepticism, disbelief and worry surrounding the people that were involved and all of the issues that it incorporated. After these events took place the police began to crackdown on the law enforcement on hackers and other computer based law breakers. The story of the Hacker Crackdown is technological, sub cultural, criminal, and legal. There were many raids that took place and it became a symbolic debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting the civil liberties of those involved.
In todays fast pace world of technology many of us leave ourselves vulnerable to become victims of a cybercrime. With people using the internet to do everything from paying bills, personal banking, and on-line shopping their financial and personal information is available at the stroke of a key to a hacker. Often someone is unaware that they have been attacked and had their information stolen. The use of the internet has grown exorbitantly throughout the world. Nelson Online reported that as of December 31, 2014, there were 360,985,492 users of the internet throughout the world. (2015) With so many users in so many countries accessing the internet, prosecuting cybercrimes is nearly impossible.
Security helps the organization meet its business objectives or mission by protecting its physical and financial resources, reputation, legal position, employees, and other tangible and intangible assets through the selection and application of appropriate safeguards. Businesses should establish roles and responsibilities of all personnel and staff members. However, a Chief Information Officer should be appointed to direct an organization’s day to day management of information assets. Supporting roles are performed by the service providers and include systems operations, whose personnel design and operate the computer systems. Each team member must be held accountable in ensuring all of the rules and policies are being followed, as well as, understanding their roles, responsibilities and functions. Organizations information processing systems are vulnerable to many threats that can inflict various types of damage that can result in significant losses (Harris, 2014). Losses can come from actions from trusted employees that defraud the system, outside hackers, or from careless data entry. The major threat to information protection is error and omissions that data entry personnel, users, system operators and programmers make. To better protect business information resources, organizations should conduct a risk analysis to see what
What concerns the government of the United States most is the security of the critical infrastructure from the cyber threats. The nation is depending heavily on the technology in most of its critical sectors to keep it up and running. Thus, this makes its more vulnerable to cyber-attacks from outsiders and insiders. Therefore, its protection must be a priority.
Waterman, Shaun. "Obama Hits Pause on U.S. Action in Face of Crippling Cyber Strikes from Syria, Iran." Washington Times 28 Aug. 2013. Print. (Source B)
The ability to conduct warfare through technological methods has increased information security awareness and the need to protect an entities infrastructure. Subsequently, cyber warfare produces increased risk to security practitioners that employ technology and other methods to mitigate risks to information and the various systems that hold or transmit data. A significant risk to information lies in the conduct of electronic commerce, hereinafter called e-commerce. E-commerce is the purchasing or selling of goods and/or services through the internet or other electronic means (Liu, Chen, Huang, & Yang, 2013). In this article, the researcher will discuss cyber warfare risks, present an evaluation on established security measures, identify potential victims of identity theft, and present an examina...
Cyber Security as an International Security Threat National and International Security is a sum of the actions taken by countries and other organizations that can guarantee the safety and well being of their population. It is vital for a nation to pre-emptively discover what issues could affect their security, and take action to prevent any detrimental or harmful events from happening. With the development of technology and the transition into a more technologically savvy society, cyber security has become one of the most prevalent and important economic and national security issues that the United States will come to face. United States President Barack Obama has identified cyber security as a key issue the nation will face. President Obama declared that the “cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation” and that “America's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cyber security (“Foreign Policy Cyber Security,” 2013).”
Every day millions in some cases billions of dollars are made by businesses from income brought in by online sale of products and services. As businesses continually develop and expand their client base with online products and services so does the desire by criminals to exploit vulnerabilities in their e-commerce setup. The mass worldwide internet usage growth within the last 20 years has been “an approximate 16 million users in 1995 to an estimated 2,937 million in March of 2014” As the importance of e-commerce increases so does the need to protect the technological infrastructure that will carry out online transactions for each business regardless of its size. I will attempt to highlight and review the history of a few cyber crimes to show the progression of the crimes within the last 30-40 years. I also plan to review how the economy and consumers are impacted by cyber crimes. Finally I will make an effort to contribute with information gathering on how to lower the risk of a cyber attack from and individual user to a large scale business.
Unless the current situation improves, stocks of all organisms that are currently fished for food are predicted to collapse drastically by 2048 (WWF 2.) Briggs emphasizes that over-fishing “has induced population collapses in many species. So instead of having less than a hundred species at risk, as was the case some 30-40 years ago, there are now a thousand or more
It is difficult to define cyberculture because its boundaries are uncertain and applications to certain circumstances can often be disputed. The common threads of defining cyberculture is a culture which has evolved and continues to evolve from the use of computer networks and the internet and is guided by social and cultural movements reflective of advancements in scientific and technological information. It is not a unified culture but rather a culture that exists in cyberspace and is a compilation of numerous new technologies and capabilities, used by diverse people in diverse real – world locations. Cyberculture, a twentieth century phenomena, has brought challenges unlike any other that the United States has seen in the areas of cyber security and its impact on our most critical institutions. This presentation will focus on the aforementioned three entities where national security is in jeopardy in part due to cyberculture and its intentional use for disruptive and destructive purposes. Breaches of security to the United States Department of Defense, the national power grid and the Chamber of Commerce are very real and omnipresent.
Cyber crime has become an important concern for not only the business firms, government, law enforcement agencies but also for the common people because these kinds of issues are related to the consumer’s day-to-day activity (Polivanyuk, 2005). Due to these types of crimes, consumer’s money, children, business organization’s integrity, consumer and company’s privacy, etc. are in danger.
Far more common than the person who is physically harmed by someone they met on the Internet is the story of someone who was hacked, which may lead to money being drained from one’s bank account, false purchases being made under one’s name, or even embarrassing information being leaked to the public. Hackers play an ever-evolving game with businesses who want to conduct transactions online; businesses work to keep their customers safe, and hackers work to find a way around these safety systems.
There are different groups, from law enforcement agencies to the U.S. Secret Service, that are attempting to combat the problem through cooperation and preemptive efforts. If these groups combined with the public to protect themselves and the country from criminals that commit cybercrime, the nation’s network and technology servers would be much safer for technology users. Clearly, cybercrime is a problem because it puts internet users at risk of being taken advantage of or harmed. The advantages of technology and the internet have led more criminals to use cyberspace to commit crimes. The threat of cybercrime is increasing as globalization continues to spread across the world.
As the internet has evolved it is now a part of many people’s daily lives and with that, many could not function or conduct their daily business or lives without it. It is impressive that we can now communicate and even see someone all the way across the country with just a few clicks of a mouse. But as technology changes and progresses seemingly for the good, many will always find ways to exploit technology and use it with the intent of committing crime, turning a positive tool into a negative one. As such the negative side of the World Wide Web, cybercrime has evolved as just one of the major disadvantages of the internet. Cybercrime itself is a broad term and can and does include any crime that is committed via the internet or computer network including seemingly minor acts as downloading music, to denial of service attacks, to even acts of cyber-terrorism. With the newly formed threat of cybercrime has also come new ways for law enforcement to attack and prevent it as well but with limited resources not much can be changed but to continue to prevent new methods from approaching the cybercrime world. This is not only just in our own neighborhoods but is at an international scale. This paper generates the insight about the overall rise of cybercrime among our societies. The main focus of this paper is to describe the types of computer crimes and its effects on individuals and businesses.