What Is Cyber Security?
At first let us understand the full meaning of what cyber security is. Cyber security involves protecting information and systems from major
cyber threats, such as cyber terrorism, cyber warfare, and cyber
espionage. In their most disruptive form, cyber threats take aim at
secret, political, military, or infrastructural assets of a nation, or
its people. Cyber security is therefore a critical part of any
governments’ security strategy. The U.S. federal government for example,
has allotted over $13 billion annually to cyber security since late
2010
What is Cyber Terrorism?
Cyber terrorism is the disruptive use of information technology by
terrorist groups to further their ideological or political agenda. This
takes the form of attacks on networks, computer systems, and
telecommunication infrastructures. For example, in response to the
removal of a Russian WWII memorial in 2007, Estonia was hit with a
massive distributed denials of service
attack that knocked almost all ministry networks and two major bank
networks offline. The rise in such cyber terrorism attacks is
measureable: in the U.S., head of Military Cyber Command Keith B.
Alexander stated that cyber attacks on facilities classified as critical
infrastructure in the United States have increased 17-fold since 2009.
What is Cyber Warfare?
Cyber warfare involves nation-states using information technology to
penetrate another nation’s networks to cause damage or disruption. In
the US and many other nation-states, cyber warfare has been acknowledged
as the fifth domain of warfare (following land, sea, air, and space).
Cyber warfare attacks are primarily executed by hackers who are well
trained in exploiting the intricacies of computer networks and operate
under the auspices and support of the nation-states. Rather than
“shutting down” a target’s key networks, a cyber warfare attack may
intrude networks for the purpose of compromising valuable data,
degrading communications, impairing infrastructural services such as
transportation and medical services, or interrupting commerce. For
example, in the 2008 South Ossetia war, Russia’s initial attacks on
Georgian soil were preceded by a synchronized cyber attack that crippled
Georgian government websites.
