Cybersecurity: A sitting Duck

Cyber terrorism and cyber crime are an overlooked threat to national and personal security. Misha Glenny, a cyber crime journalist and expert, has said that “there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they’ve been hacked, and those that don’t.”

His quote points to two key points of cyber crime: its ubiquity and our ignorance of our vulnerability to it. For every tech innovation, we give hackers another point of access to sensitive information. Due to both the eagerness to digitize data and capitalist competitiveness, we rush to innovate and make systems live. To fully secure a system takes time we aren’t often willing to sacrifice, and often it takes a hack before we realize where the points of weakness are.

Data hacking is not the only vulnerability for cyber crime and terrorism. The reliance of many physical systems on digital operation presents an opportunity for cyber threats to become physical threats. Trend Micro was able to show that the Automated Identification System that tracks the locations of sea vessels could be easily hacked (as shown in the image), due in part to its clunky and antiquated construction.

The threat of cyberterrorism and cyber-crime should be of paramount concern to both public and private stakeholders. We should no longer be satisfied with digital security that can only find and fix security risks after they have been exploited. Rather, the federal government should assume responsibility for cyber security and regulate digital systems by requiring that all data systems adhere to strict guidelines to ensure security before they are permitted to go live.

We cannot wait until after a catastrophe occurs to make concerted efforts to improve our very faulty cybersecurity.