Last month’s hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment has highlighted the vulnerability of companies to cyberattack. The hackers stole confidential documents, deleted the originals, and left threatening messages. With the computers unusable even days after the attack, employees resorted to using white boards to do their work. Meanwhile, the hackers released the confidential documents to journalists, and five Sony movies to the public at large.
The Sony hack clearly demonstrates a need for improved cybersecurity. Governments are not the only ones vulnerable, and state secrets are not the only targets. To learn more about how we can prevent future cyberattacks with improved security, check out our Cybersecurity Collection:
We depend on information and information technology (IT) to make many of our day-to-day tasks easier and more convenient. Computers play key roles in transportation, health care, banking, and energy. Businesses use IT for payroll and accounting, inventory and sales, and research and development. Modern military forces use weapons that are increasingly coordinated through computer-based networks. Cybersecurity is vital to protecting all of …
Given the growing importance of cyberspace to nearly all aspects of national life, a secure cyberspace is vitally important to the nation, but cyberspace is far from secure today. The United States faces the real risk that adversaries will exploit vulnerabilities in the nation s critical information systems, thereby causing considerable suffering and damage. Online e-commerce business, government agency files, and identity records are all …
The United States is increasingly dependent on information and information technology for both civilian and military purposes, as are many other nations. Although there is a substantial literature on the potential impact of a cyberattack on the societal infrastructure of the United States, little has been written about the use of cyberattack as an instrument of U.S. policy. …
Despite many advances, security and privacy often remain too complex for individuals or enterprises to manage effectively or to use conveniently. Security is hard for users, administrators, and developers to understand, making it all too easy to use, configure, or operate systems in ways that are inadvertently insecure. Moreover, security and privacy technologies originally were developed in a context in which system administrators had …