Today’s technological age, with the aggressively expanding cyberspace, is day by day increasing our dependency on the online cyber experience. The 2020 pandemic has only accelerated an already increasingly virtual world we live in. This has inevitably expanded the cyber challenges we are facing as well; in 2013, the Department of Defence and some US states were facing 10-20 million cyber attacks every day, and by 2014, there was a 27% increase in successful cyberattacks, culminating with the infamous hack of Sony Pictures. The media focuses on punitive aspects of the attacks such as the losses, instead of on the processes that led to the hack in the first place.
Most cyber-attacks employ simple phishing schemes, as an e-card on Valentine’s day. Clicking on such innocuous emails opens virtual backdoors to our organizational systems, making us the “unintentional insider” who’s giving the hackers access and spreading the infection. Hindering this would require us to develop better cyber hygiene, and unearth the cyber behaviors that lead to them. Arun Vishwanath’s research has brought to light three main reasons for such breaches; limited attention to email content, routinized online practices that lower our conscious defenses, and misconceptualized ‘Cyber Risk Beliefs’.
The process of resolving cyber attacks begins with imparting information on cyber safety from the school level itself. We must educate individual online users to become better at detecting online fraud, and flawed cyber-risk beliefs must be replaced with objective factual knowledge. Businesses and companies must be more discerning of their employees’ online practices and cyber hygiene, especially with bring your own device (BYOD) now, where a single compromised personal device could bring down the whole company’s network. Finally, from the legal point of view, we must centralize the reporting of our cyber breaches. The Personal Data Notification and Protection Act of the President calls for reporting of data breaches by the companies within 30 days. For instance, like the City of London Police’s Action Fraud, to which all types of cyberattacks are reported, along with a specialized team ‘FALCON’ to quickly respond to and even address impending cyberattacks.
For more information, please click on https://www.avantresearchgroup.com/2015/02/who-is-to-blame-for-cyber-attacks/