In my honest opinion, this person hasn’t gone into enough depth. What I think they fail to understand is that people have and do go into a lot of effort to ensure that there isn’t a country-global wide cybersecurity disaster. The NSA or ASIO here in Australia do a LOT of work to prevent these, and they do a good job at it.
While we can’t stop security flaws found in systems; after all we are human; we can drastically prevent many other sectors of cybersecurity. While the article claims that a digital Perl Harbor has not yet happened, I think the fact that in this year alone I’ve seen at least 10 breaches containing over 100 million passwords is a major issue.
While events may not affect entire countries, a cyberbreach can destroy someones entire life. Take this for example. Someone hacks into someone’s bank account and funnels out all their money. Financial life destroyed. Someone takes someone’s phone. Social life destroyed. All these events add up, and this is much more rare with non-cyber disasters. The other day, I was talking to someone with whom ransomware has destroyed their business. These things add up.
TL;DR: While the general structure and the core systems of the Internet are very secure and difficult to be breached (unlike physical places in the real world), the end users aren’t educated to prevent breaches and as such many littler breaches happen on end users that can destroy their lives (unlike the real world).
Good point. There’s still plenty of damage being done, but I think the point being made here is that the doomsday scenarios predicted by the cybersecurity field have by and large not happened (even including the fact that investment in security has only kept pace with other tech investment).
DISCLAIMER: I do not intent to start a flamewar.
In my honest opinion, this person hasn’t gone into enough depth. What I think they fail to understand is that people have and do go into a lot of effort to ensure that there isn’t a country-global wide cybersecurity disaster. The NSA or ASIO here in Australia do a LOT of work to prevent these, and they do a good job at it.
While we can’t stop security flaws found in systems; after all we are human; we can drastically prevent many other sectors of cybersecurity. While the article claims that a digital Perl Harbor has not yet happened, I think the fact that in this year alone I’ve seen at least 10 breaches containing over 100 million passwords is a major issue.
While events may not affect entire countries, a cyberbreach can destroy someones entire life. Take this for example. Someone hacks into someone’s bank account and funnels out all their money. Financial life destroyed. Someone takes someone’s phone. Social life destroyed. All these events add up, and this is much more rare with non-cyber disasters. The other day, I was talking to someone with whom ransomware has destroyed their business. These things add up.
TL;DR: While the general structure and the core systems of the Internet are very secure and difficult to be breached (unlike physical places in the real world), the end users aren’t educated to prevent breaches and as such many littler breaches happen on end users that can destroy their lives (unlike the real world).
Good point. There’s still plenty of damage being done, but I think the point being made here is that the doomsday scenarios predicted by the cybersecurity field have by and large not happened (even including the fact that investment in security has only kept pace with other tech investment).
I’ll give them that, there hasn’t actually been a huge “doomsday” scenario, but as I said people do a crap-ton to prevent that.