discussion2
Post 1
Week 3 Discussion : diversity and commonality
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A one-stop shop is a factor that entails online threats and vulnerable faces in gas pipeline companies. Many hacking threats occur, but mostly they remain unrealized or unreported by the pipeline operators. For instance, some cyber incidents may remain undetected for an extended period causing a severe effect on the government, citizens, and the environment. However, these cyber threats on pipeline organizations may cause high loss to the economy as even the insurance coverage may fail to cover all the losses. The pipeline products or facilities may be damaged by cyberattacks imposing severe weather disruption in the country. These attacks may include significant damage to the people, property, and environment, causing loss of life when the incidences occur ("SECURITY: Cyber raises threat against America's energy backbone," 2019). Diversity and commonality will help in the recruitment of more experienced individuals with crucial skills to deal with these online threats and attacks.
The internet exposure facilitates the hacking of the pipeline system to disrupt the operations and conduct the attacks. According to the cybersecurity experts and energy industry professionals, internet exposure makes the pipeline companies be mostly targeted and easy to attack the system. The advancement in technology exposes and provides a large scale opportunity for attacks on the information systems to attack the critical infrastructure systems ("SECURITY: Cyber raises threat against America's energy backbone," 2019). However, the use of internet-connected devices in the pipeline system may be used to amplify certain types of cyberattacks on other devices if it's poorly implemented and defended. Recent advancement in the internet connection facilitates the loss of critical information causing much loss to the economy due to the damages from the attacks. Thus, commonality and diversity well help provide information and recognize recent technologies to fight the cybersecurity threats on the internet.
Reference
SECURITY: Cyber raises threat against America's energy backbone. (2019, November 5).
Retrieved from https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060054924
Yuen, R. W. (2013). Could Board Diversity Help Performance? SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2222586
Post2
Threats impacting economy - Diversity and Commonality to mitigate them
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The article details the natural source’s energy attacks, the current measures used in place and the challenges in protecting them. It’s annoying and makes to feel anger when the cyberattacks are done by the individuals of other country's defense officials. Energy systems are crucial in a country's economic growth and development. If these systems are prone to cyberattacks, it raises serious concern and fear in the public.
Due to advancements in technology, all the sectors are automating the activities from manual to automatic. It’s a good sign in terms of advancements but the downside of this is, all the systems need to connect to the Internet in order to remotely operate. Once the systems are connected to the Internet, the data transfers in the form of packets. Even though the data is transferred through secure channels using standard protocols, but if the systems which are transmitting and receiving the data are not secured properly then they are at a very high risk of cyberattacks.
Diversity and commonality are two important terms which provides the rules (i.e. methods and approaches) for securing the systems and loopholes which might result in potential attacks. Diversity ensures, systems must be designed in an isolated way i.e. split the monolithic component to smaller ones and build smaller components using a different technology stack. This ensures that even if one component is hacked by the attacker, he might not be able to break into another system because it is built using a different technology stack and the measures used to protect that component might be different from the one in which he got access into. Commonality checks for the standard list of security measures are meeting by the system. If not, the system fails the audit which is the check for standards. To conclude, yes diversity and commonality provide a way to secure and build a robust system that can sustain cyberattacks. But in the end, as per my understanding, there are no bulletproof standards, where if the system meets those standards means it’s secure. Cyber attackers are developing new techniques. So, the security professionals who are in nation duty should think out of the box.
References:
· Amoroso, E. G., & Vacca, J. R. (2013). Cyber attacks: protecting national infrastructure. Waltham, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
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Post3
There are various cyber-attacks that are occurring on the companies in the United States. The attacks are on wastewater plants, natural gas plants, attacks on other SCADA systems. These attacks are causing great loss to the organizations both financially, strategically and also in terms of reputation.
There is an estimate that the malicious attacks on the company’s cost the U.S economy between $57 billion to $109 billion in one year (E&E News, 2017). With the attacks, there is a lot of data and property destruction, business disruption, theft of proprietary data and loss of other financial and strategic information. The attacks on the organizations first damage the organizations that are linked economically and then this damages the whole economy. With the Cyber-attacks, the market costs of the organization will lower the market value (E&E News, 2017). There is a lot of impact on the stock value and this is one of the major threats to the organization. Companies estimate their returns based on the market model and capital asset model and this will estimate the organization returns. Organizations are losing on an average of about 0.8 percent of their value following the week after the data threat (E&E News, 2017).
There will be direct economic destruction after the attack occurs and there will be billions of dollars lost in the property and there will be a lot of uncertainty in the market. The insurance companies, trade, tourism, and FDI will get affected with the cyber-attacks. There will be a lack of trust in organizations with these attacks (O'Hara, 2010).
There is a lot of shortage of cybersecurity skills globally and there is a gap of around 3 million and at the same time, there is an increase in the number of cyber-attacks on the organizations. In order to overcome the cyber-attacks and as part of the mitigation techniques, companies need to diversify their employees and they need to bring a new range of skills to the company (Kate, 2018). The diversity comes in many ranges and those include gender, sexual, orientation, physical abilities, age, and religious beliefs. There is a belief that women can gauge risk more properly when compared with men. There will be a change in pattern behaviors due to diversity and the ideas that women are coming up with is tremendous. The company should train people and provide some practice tests and they need to do bring diversity from day one (Kate, 2018).
Companies should focus on commonality in sharing the experiences, interests of all the individuals in the company. There are various cyber threats and mitigation techniques, and all these should be trained and explained to every individual in the organization. This will help the organization to get prepared for all kinds of attacks (Kate, 2018).
References:
E&E News. (2017). Cyber raises threats against America's energy backbone. Retrieved from
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060054924
Kate, F. (2018). How diversity can help fight cyber-attacks. Retrieved from
https://www.information-age.com/how-diversity-can-cyber-123477494/
O'Hara, G. (2010). Cyber-Espionage: A growing threat to the American economy. CommLaw Conspectus, 19, 241.