3 basic term used in learning cyber security:

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.