President Bill Clinton in 1998 put it rather direct “Our foes have extended the fields of battle – from physical space to cyberspace” (O’Hara, 2004). If our former president acknowledged this fact, I strongly believe that cyber terrorism or attack is a real and an ever expanding threat against our well being and a security challenge. O’Hara (2004) pointed out that cyber warfare is now a primary tool in the information warfare arsenal to achieve non-kinetic attacks which is the type of attack not aimed at physical destruction but is designed to impact the adversary’s will to fight and decision making process.
The US federal government has acknowledged that we are susceptible to cyber terrorism because digital security controls has not been built into most of our critical systems from the design phase and in the entire system life cycle. It is now that we are catching up and the resilient of our cyber protecting mechanisms are still questionable. Cyber attacks can easily be launched provided you have a computer; internet connection and a variety of hacking and cyber warfare tools which are available on a multitude of internet sites worldwide. The price of perpetrating a cyber attack is just a fraction of the cost of the economic or physical damage such an attack can produce: cyber attack is also characterized by aggressive enemy efforts to collect intelligence on the country’s weapons, electrical grid, traffic-control systems, and even its financial markets (Lipman Report, 2010).
The damage to our critical infrastructures will be unprecedented if we are attacked by cyber criminals either sponsored by rogue states or organized criminals. Our transportation hubs, air-control systems, water treatment plants and telecommunication facilities are targets of such attacks and the impact on our lives will be so catastrophic and the economic loss will be immeasurable and may be worst than 911. Cyber warfare can negatively affect our economic prosperity in this century and beyond. Just of recent a cyber attack due to the Stuxnet worm caused international havoc and systematically shutdown the Iranian nuclear program.
The treat of cyber attacks is real if the likes of Google and Cisco networks can be hacked and attacked by the bad guys. Exploitable vulnerabilities are making our critical infrastructures unsecured to the point that hackers are just a step away of using malicious codes to take full control of even the highly classified systems. This is frightened but is the truth. It is only recently that the US federal government through the various agencies under the auspices of NIST sanctioned them to perform periodic the risk assessment of their systems and network infrastructures. The agencies are to develop remedial and mitigation plans to curtail security risks and other associated problems within a timeframe. However, if we anticipate and know of any imminent threats from cyber criminals or rouge states, we have absolute right to defend ourselves using all information security arsenals and even convectional weapons. Pre-emptive strikes should be part of our cyber security defense vocabularies and we must be capable of developing cyber offensive capabilities. Good defensive operations will point in the direction of the attacker, which then allows offensive operations to target them for retaliation (O’Hara, 2004).
Urgent proactive actions such continuous monitoring , patch management and development of multiple layers of defense as well as perimeter securities are needed to guide against cyber warfare and other malicious intents. In addition, we need to train more security professionals who can design secure systems, write safe computer codes and create the ever more sophisticated tools needed to prevent, detect and mitigate and reconstitute systems after an attack (Lipman Report, 2010). We must not be complacent with our security and develop false sense of security when are still vulnerable to incessant cyber attacks.
References
O’Hara T. (2004). Cyber warfare and cyber terrorism. Retrieved April 12, 2012, from http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA424310
The Lipman Report (2010). Threats to the information highway: Cyber warfare, cyber terrorism and cyber Crime. Retrieved April 12, 2012, from http://www.guardsmark.com/files/computer_security/TLR_Oct_10.pdf
Godwin Omolola
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