Impact of Modern Technology on Cyber Security
Question:
Discuss About The Organisations Are Implementing Technology?
With the advancement in digital age, the infrastructure of industries is improving as well. Organisations are implementing modern technology in their processes to provide their customers more facilities. Generally, the core of such facilities is the internet based system. The popularity of the internet has provided new opportunities to business, to increase their number of customers by providing better services. Peoples prefer internet based services because it saves time, money and gives more options to consumers. Due to the popularity of its services, hackers are using the internet to attack the data of organisations and persons. Cybercrimes has become a matter of national security in many countries. Many governments are using internet based systems to secure their confidential data and leakage of such data can be a significant threat to national security.
Individuals are also using internet services to communicate and share personal data more than ever. It is important for peoples, companies, and government to protect their data from hackers; therefore, it is necessary to implement cyber security policies. This report will discuss the problems faced by organisations why maintain their cyber security. The report will take the example of cyber-attack on Sony Corporation and other organisations to understand the motives for cyber-attacks and reason of the failure of an organisation to maintain proper security measures.
The primary objective of this report is to understand the challenges encountered by organisations while maintaining their cyber security. The example of Sony Corporation and various other companies will be analysed to understand the impact of cyber-attack and reason for cyber security. Further, the report will provide suggestions to improve organisational policies regarding cyber security.
The usage of internet based services and their impact on security will be evaluated in the report. The theories of technical experts to enhance cyber security will be discussed in the report. Various cyber risks and their solution will be discussed in the report from the perspective of different corporations.
According to Knapp and Samani (2013), modern organisations are using internet based services at a significantly high rate. With the use of latest technology, corporations are providing better facilities to their customers. The modernisation of internet based technology has also increased the number of cyber-attacks on corporations (Figure 1). Due to this threat, corporations are realising the importance of cyber security in their organisation.
Challenges Faced by Organisations in Maintaining Cyber Security
In past few decades, the threat of cyber-attacks has substantially been grown, the reason for that is modernisation of technology. According to Waxman (2011), the advancement of technology allows companies to easily implement internet services to their business processes, which provide better services to customers. The popularity of internet is one of the reasons for the increase in a number of cyber crimes but there several other reasons as well (Figure 1).
Most of the organisations do not prefer to implement cyber security due to its heavy expenditure. The cost for various security software are high for small or even medium corporations, therefore, companies do not apply strict procedures for online security. The lack of security makes corporations easy target for hackers, and they take full advantage of such situation (Sridhar, Hahm and Govindarasu 2012).
With the easy availability of internet in people’s smartphones, many organisations provide their services through the internet straight to smartphones. Mobile wallet or e-banking are some of the examples of such services. People use their smartphones as wallets by using them for payments, booking or performing other internet based transactions. For example, PayPal, Google Wallet, and Apple Passbook act as wallet which allows users to pay for things. As per the research of Arabo and Pranggono (2013), banks also let their clients perform banking activities straight from their smartphone, which reduce the requirement of visiting banks. The banking details safe in smartphones are targeted by hackers to gain access to people’s bank accounts. The banking corporations are also targeted because they shifted their business on online platforms.
Social media sites are significantly popular in between people, making it an ideal place to advertise company’s products and services. People also share a large amount of personal information on social sites. According to the research of Youmans and York (2012), hackers use social media sites to collect data regarding users and use them to hack their accounts. Social sites have various flaws such as anyone can create a fake account, no way to know who is using an account and lack of privacy.
Most of the security breaches are conducted due to the negligence of employees. As per Amoroso (2012), employees intentionally or unintentionally failed to perform their security duties which make it easier for a hacker to gain access to information. Many IT employees do not have enough knowledge or skills to stop a cyber-criminal from hacking into their accounts.
Types of Cyber-Attacks and their Impacts on Organisations
Modern technology has increased the risk of cyber crimes on the organisation; hackers are finding new methods to attack a business data. Corporations are facing various problems in maintaining their security of their online information (Figure 4). Few examples of their challenges are provided below:
Malware is the virus used by cyber criminals to gain access or collect information from another computer. There are different types of malware used by the hacker. Following are few examples:
- Adware: This malware display advertisement on a person’s computer which redirects them to hackers serves. They restrict the access of users from their computer and collect their data. Most notable attacks have been on eBay and Red Bull, where cyber criminals use fake advertisement to hack users (Zhu, Joseph and Sastry 2011).
- Spyware: This makes spy on its users and collects information regarding their online activities. After determining the activities, this malware also provides an advertisement to the user (Denning and Denning 2010).
- Ransomware: This is a modern malware which is popular between various cyber criminals. The hackers use this malware to gain access to a person’s data and after that demand, ransom to give back the access. Usually, after paying the ransom, they do not give back the access. Some application of ransomware includes GoldenEye, CryptoLocker, and Crysis (Sanatinia and Noubir 2015).
- Smartphone Malware: Smartphones are significantly popular nowadays and most people use them to perform various financial tasks. Hackers attack smartphones using internet advertisements or back doors, to collect personal details of its user. Most people using smartphones does not have full knowledge regarding protection of their privacy on smartphones, which makes them an easy target for cyber criminals. Example of smartphone malware includes, ‘DroidDream’ which released as an application in play store and affected various devices. Another example is ‘HongTouTou’ virus, which installed in other application to affect the smartphones of users (Seo et al. 2014).
As per Carr (2011), usually, the cyber-attacks are performed with the help of inside employees. According to a study conducted by IBM, more than 60 percent of cyber-attacks are conducted by the inside employees instead of outside hackers. Generally, to gain some profit, employees give access of company’s computer to hackers. Edward Snowden is a good example; he leaked the data of CIA in public.
Many cyber criminals hack another company’s system not to gain profits; instead their objective is to expose the company’s information in public. As per Hampson (2011), these hackers are more dangerous since their motive is to destroy the reputation and business of an organisation. These hackers usually target giant corporations who work with public money, such as banks, insurance firms, and charitable institutes. Popular attacks of hacktivism include the attack on Bank of America, to expose the loan frauds conducted by the company. Another popular hacktivist attack was on Sony Corporations, due to the objection against their lawsuit relating to Play Station.
It is another method of cybercrime, in which hackers send emails to random users as reputable organisations. The emails contain some kind of offer or lottery prize to lure the user into clicking on such emails. After clicking on such mail hackers usually give them false hope of winning a lottery and ask for a small prize to get such amount, or they redirect them to their servers to hack their accounts. As per the research of Anti-Phishing Working Group, as compared to previous years, the number of phishing attacks has grown up to 65 percent in 2016 (Rid and Buchanan 2015) (Figure 2).
Drones have become popular in past one year and many drone manufacturing companies are making cheap drones for families. As per the research of O’Malley (2017), this popularity raises the risk of dronejacking since drones are connected to a particular network, it is easier for hackers to hack such network and take control of the drone. Organisations such as Amazon are using a drone in new existing ways, such as home delivery of products or pizza, but the threat of drone hacking has raised the level of risk.
Suggestions for Improving Cyber Security
Various giant corporations like BBC and Dyn has become the victim of a Distributed denial of service or DDoS attack. Hackers gain the access of a business computer and prevent them from performing their activities. The most recent attack of DDoS has been on Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s election campaign (Li et al. 2012).
With the increase in the number of mobile devices, organisations also started to focus on mobile services. Most large organisations in customers business have their application in play store and app store. This benefits company by enhancing their reach to a large number of users which eventually increase their customer’s base as well. These services require the user to share their personal information through smartphones which assist the company in analysing their buying pattern and their preferences. Cyber criminals also focus on collecting such data to blackmail or leak such data. A recent attack on Apple cloud service called the cloud, leakage more than 500 private photos of celebrities. This incident shows the high risks of hacking smartphones (Sadeghi, Wachsmann and Waidner 2015) (Figure 3).
Artificial intelligence is their future of technology; it has been used by the organisation in consumer demand predictions, market plan analysis, large data analysis and virtual assistance. Google, Facebook, and Apple have been investing heavily in machine learning technology to gain an advantage over one another. This shows the importance of AI in future technologies. But like another technology, it can be hacked as well. Cyber criminals can use machine learning to gain an advantage by illegal activities. Therefore, the proper measure of security is required before implementing this technology in people’s devices (Barford et al. 2010).
- Sony Pictures Entertainment: In November 2014, the hackers of North Korea attack on the servers to Sony to get access to their confidential data. The reason for such hack was a movie produced by Sony which depicts North Korea as a negative nation. The cyber criminals take terabytes of private data from Sony and leaked their sensitive information on the web. These attacks cause huge loss to Sony entertainments due to leakage of their movies and data (Walters 2015).
- GoDaddy: In 2014, the Syrian-based hackers group attack the servers of GoDaddy to gain access to Domain name of giant corporations such as CNBC, Forbes. PCWorld and the Chicago.
- Yahoo: The data breach of Yahoo is world’s largest data breach where a billion accounts were affected. In this breach, the hackers gain access to Yahoo’s user’s personal data and their account information, which affected the site negatively.
- Morgan Stanley: An employee of the company steals data of more than 350,000 clients and posts some of the information The employee was fired from the organisation and data was removed from the online websites as well.
This risk of Cyber security is enormous and many companies have already faced the negative effects. It is important for organisations and individuals to protect their information from cyber criminals. Following suggestions can assist the organisation in securing their data online:
- Dedicated Budget: Most companies avoid cyber security policies due to their high costs; this eventually increases the number of cyber crimes. It is necessary for companies to prepare a dictated budget for their cyber security expenses and implement such money on improving their cyber security (Liu et al. 2012).
- Physical Protection: It is necessary for organisations to physically protect their computers and software from hacker’s access. The employees working on the computer should be checked properly before entering or exiting the computer lab.
- Encryption of Data: Hacker usually attacks the remaining information which transmitting the data by company. By encrypting their data, the company can avoid such risk. Encrypting s data does not take a long time and provide a high level of security.
- Antivirus: Use of antiviruses in all computer devices will assist the corporation in preventing any virus from entering the server. Antivirus is created to protect the computer from cyber-attacks and scan its data. Organisations should invest in good quality antivirus software’s to avoid any viruses.
- Passwords: The password use by individuals while using social media or banking services should be different and strong. To ensure a high level of safety, people should change their passwords every week. The password should not be obvious such as date of birth or some personal details.
- Checking of Details: While using credit cards or debit cards for the online transaction the user should enable real time notification service which is provided by banks. In this service, a notification is sent to user’s mobile after completion of each activity. Also, a person should check their transactions details every week.
- Security Culture: The security measure must be adopted by organisations as an essential part of their organisational culture. The employees of the corporation should be trained to avoid any accidental data leakage and should also perform their due diligence in data security (Gavas, Memon and Britton 2012).
- Other Measures: Implementation of various other security measures to ensure the protecting of data. For example, log out of users after inactivity of 5 or 10 minutes will avoid the misuse of employee’s computer in a break. Use of security camera is also necessary to avoid any illegal activity by employee or third party.
Conclusion
The above report provided that the internet has become an essential part of an organisational strategy to increase their customers. The popularity of internet and smartphones has created a new market of opportunities for corporations but at the same time, it has introduced several risks. Corporations are required to properly implement security measure to avoid any cyber crimes. Hackers are using the internet to attack new people and organisations to gain unfair advantages. Cyber criminals use a new method to attack organisations such as Hacktivism, drone jacking, malware, Phishing and Distributed denial of service. The companies are required to use modern technology for protection against cyber crimes. Prepare implementation of security policies and preparing a dedicated budget for security investments is mandatory for protecting. Individuals can protect their data by using strong passwords and smarting brewing the web. The awareness regarding online security should be spread between corporation’s employees and effective implementation of security policies is necessary
Conclusion
References
Amoroso, E.G., 2012. Cyber attacks: protecting national infrastructure. Elsevier.
Arabo, A. and Pranggono, B., 2013, May. Mobile malware and smart device security: Trends, challenges and solutions. In Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 2013 19th International Conference on (pp. 526-531). IEEE.
Barford, P., Dacier, M., Dietterich, T.G., Fredrikson, M., Giffin, J.T., Jajodia, S., Jha, S., Li, J.H., Liu, P., Ning, P. and Ou, X., 2010. Cyber SA: Situational Awareness for Cyber Defense. Cyber Situational Awareness, 46(1), pp.3-13.
BBC., Phishing attacks soar in the UK. BBC. Retrieved from < https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7348737.stm#blq-main >
Carr, J., 2011. Inside cyber warfare: Mapping the cyber underworld. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”.
Cyber Guardian., 2014. Social Media: To be or not to be. Cyber Guardian. Retrieved from < https://www.slcert.gov.lk/CyberGuardian/022014/index.htm >
Denning, P.J. and Denning, D.E., 2010. Discussing cyber attack. Communications of the ACM, 53(9), pp.29-31.
Gavas, E., Memon, N. and Britton, D., 2012. Winning cybersecurity one challenge at a time. IEEE Security & Privacy, 10(4), pp.75-79.
Hampson, N., 2011. Hacktivism, anonymous & a new breed of protest in a networked world. Browser Download This Paper.
Knapp, E.D. and Samani, R., 2013. Applied cyber security and the smart grid: implementing security controls into the modern power infrastructure. Newnes.
Li, X., Liang, X., Lu, R., Shen, X., Lin, X. and Zhu, H., 2012. Securing smart grid: cyber attacks, countermeasures, and challenges. IEEE Communications Magazine, 50(8).
Liu, J., Xiao, Y., Li, S., Liang, W. and Chen, C.P., 2012. Cyber security and privacy issues in smart grids. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 14(4), pp.981-997.
Nayak, S., 2016. Cybersecurity-Serverless-Graph DB. Slide Share. Retrieved from < https://www.slideshare.net/SukumarNayak/cybersecurityserverlessgraph-db-70103538 >
O’Malley, J., 2017. Pirates of the skies [drone-jacking]. Engineering & Technology, 12(3), pp.32-35.
Passeri, P., 2012. June 2012 Cyber Attacks Statistics (Part I). Hackmageddon. Retrieved from < https://www.hackmageddon.com/2012/06/21/june-2012-cyber-attacks-statistics-part-i/ >
Rid, T. and Buchanan, B., 2015. Attributing cyber attacks. Journal of Strategic Studies, 38(1-2), pp.4-37.
Sadeghi, A.R., Wachsmann, C. and Waidner, M., 2015, June. Security and privacy challenges in industrial internet of things. In Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2015 52nd ACM/EDAC/IEEE (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Sanatinia, A. and Noubir, G., 2015, June. Onionbots: Subverting privacy infrastructure for cyber attacks. In Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2015 45th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on (pp. 69-80). IEEE.
Seo, S.H., Gupta, A., Sallam, A.M., Bertino, E. and Yim, K., 2014. Detecting mobile malware threats to homeland security through static analysis. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 38, pp.43-53.
Sridhar, S., Hahn, A. and Govindarasu, M., 2012. Cyber–physical system security for the electric power grid. Proceedings of the IEEE, 100(1), pp.210-224.
Walters, R., 2015. Cyber Attacks on U.S. Companies Since November 2014. The Heritage Foundation. Retrreived from < https://www.heritage.org/cybersecurity/report/cyber-attacks-us-companies-november-2014 >
Waxman, M.C., 2011. Cyber-attacks and the use of force: Back to the future of article 2 (4).
Youmans, W.L. and York, J.C., 2012. Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements. Journal of Communication, 62(2), pp.315-329.
Zhu, B., Joseph, A. and Sastry, S., 2011, October. A taxonomy of cyber attacks on SCADA systems. In Internet of things (iThings/CPSCom), 2011 international conference on and 4th international conference on cyber, physical and social computing (pp. 380-388). IEEE.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
