Cyber Attacks (Essay Sample)

Cyber War Name Institution Course Instructor Due Date YouTube Video The reason Cyber-attack matters is because these crimes are being perpetrated in a wider scale than it has ever been over the past years. More importantly, those behind these attacks on many occasions end up in the wind with the government having no clues as to how they can be caught and by them the damages will already have been felt. Organizations and homes are most likely to be impacted by these cyber-crimes. Organizations will lose billions of dollars as well as lose information in criminal cyber-crime as well as espionage. Homes may also be affected when cyber-attacks affect their supply of basics for survival that may include money, electricity etc. The issue of cyber-attacks should be addressed by the countries leading in such crimes. As stated by Clarke, each nations aims at retaliating the attacks perpetrated against it. This therefore means that there will be a cyber-attack spree if the responsible countries fail to come up with a proper solution. Nations should therefore have open talks with regards to cyber risk reductions. Entities such as ‘cyber arms control’ should be established to regulate the rate at which these actions are perpetrated. Personally, I am worried sick about the matter of cyber-attacks. It is clear that each country has the ability to perpetrate an offence, but is very poor in finding a defence. This worries me as the war of machines will be on the rise as long as there are cyber offences being done. Also, cyber defences are very costly and still, this does not guarantee protection from attacks and therefore my worry arises when offences are on the rise and no defences are there to counter. SCADA SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), is a systems that is composed of both hardware as well as software elements that gives power to industrial organizations. This power allows them to monitor data and process it simultaneously in real time, record a series of events into a log file, control industrial processes both remotely and locally and finally interact directly with devices such as motors, sensors and valves through HMI (Human-machine Interface) software. These systems are of importance to industrial organizations and they help achieve efficiency, assist in making smart decisions in data processing and also mitigate system downtime. Stuxnet and the “Aurora Generator Test” Stuxnet is computer worm that has been developed with the sole aim of attacking industrial control systems. This worm exploits multiple unknown windows zero-day vulnerabilities in order to infect computers. Suxnet is the first worm that can cause real physical affects to an industrial system and thereby the first known actual cyber-weapon (Fruhlinger, 2017). The Suxnet worm has a rapid infectious rate even though it does little or no harm to systems that haven’t been linked to Uranium enrichment. This therefore means the worm targets computers that have been connected to a specific mode of PLC’s (Programmable Logic Controllers) before altering the main programming codes resulting to machine malfunction. Aurora Generator Test on the other hand is an experimented that was conducted to show the importance of cybersecurity in an industrial infrastructure. This test was mainly in demonstration of a cyberattack on a power network. To perform this experiment, a 2.25 MW diesel generator was used to communicate with the devices (The Aurora Project, 2018). This attach therefore consisted of disconnecting the generator from the network for a period of time to lose the synchronization and then later reconnect it. Later, the frequency of the power grid was later increased beyond its usual range to cause the break system, in charge of lowering the operating frequency to explode. The difference in frequency between the network and the generator led the relays to damage the brakes and cause intense shocks to the machine. Cyber Attacks In 2012, there was an espionage cyber-attack on the US Office of Personnel Management. This attack that was allegedly perpetrated by the Chinese government resulted in the personal information of over 21 million Americans falling into the hands of hackers. Access to sensitive data of those who applied or worked for the federal government was accessed by the perpetrators even though this information intrusion did not lead to any long-term harm (DeCapua, 2019). A Chinese national, an expert in malware development was later arrested in association to the attack. In a hacktivist cyber-attack in 2...