How Cyber War Could Kill Millions of Americans

Imagine this scenario: You wake up one morning to your cell phone alarm to see that your battery isn't fully charged as normal, but rather still holding onto the last 24% of charge from the previous night. Frustrated that you need to invest in a new charger, you move over to your desktop and turn it on, realizing that it's not working either. At least now you know that it was probably just a breaker that tripped over night, so you check your breaker box, only to discover that everything seems normal. So next to blame is the power company. Luckily your phone is still partially alive, so you try to give a call to the company, but can't connect to any cell towers. What's happening? You pull out your radio to try to listen to the news - once again, nothing. Every station that you normally listen to is all static.

The Need for Network Security Monitoring

The need for security is growing at a pace that most organizations cannot keep up with. As the cyber defenses that we create get more advanced, so do the attack methods of malicious parties. The balance between accessibility, integrity, and confidentiality is constantly fought over between departments of an organization. While the security team pushes for better confidentiality, the C-level executives and managers dive for increased accessibility. The integrity of the information, however, is crucial to both parties. Finding a balance between these three components is a key requirement of a security system’s development.

With the competitive business world that we live in, there are a wide variety of malicious parties that are targeting the information within servers of organizations in all industries in order to gain an advantage in the global market. These adversaries are not only originating from other American businesses, but also from entities in China, Russia, and North Korea. China, as our main cyber adversary, is at a point of growth that is impressive, but has been continuing at a surprisingly fast rate. The continued economic development is pushed extremely hard in China by the ruling Communist party, who would lose a lot of their power if the blooming economy would turn around. One of the biggest ways that they can support this growth is by stealing information that would otherwise cost them more money to create themselves. They can do this because the innovative businesses will invest billions of dollars into research and development for new technologies. The overhead cost of these new technologies is mind-blowing in some cases, but usually pays for itself once a final product hits the market. China, on the other hand, can eliminate these costs if they can instead break into the networks of those businesses and steal the information that has come from the investments of both public and private industries. Check out FireEye's cyber threat map to see who's attacking who in cyber space.

The biggest development in security over the past ten years has been the growth of security departments within an organization. Many companies in the past had just setup a simple firewall and antivirus program and assumed they were safe. Modernly, attackers are increasingly advancing to the point at which they can avoid detection by these automated layers of defense, requiring a staff of security analysts to monitor and defend today’s networks. The greatest tool that your analyst staff can have is a Network Security Monitoring Platform.

In my next post, I will be explaining what a Network Security Monitoring system is and how your organization can benefit from implementing one.