Essay On Cyberecurity Technology

As a member of the power sector, DTL Power is absolutely vital to the operations of other critical infrastructure pieces. The other key pieces of critical infrastructure represented in our environment are the Federal Government, Avistel Telecom, Mistral Bank, and Hytema Defense. Electrical power is the core of the US critical infrastructure, and without the energy supplied by the power sector, none of these other infrastructure pieces will be able to continue operations after local backup energy stores are depleted. It is for this reason that DTL Power?s primary security objective is power system uptime.

In round two of the simulation, an attack on DTL Power left services down for hours last Wednesday. The cyber-attack left residential, business, and government customers in the dark for hours. During the forensic investigation, evidence revealed that the cause of the attack was a worm intrusion that caused a reduction in DTL system functions. This reduction in system functions resulted in an excessive amount of downtime. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of DTL?s system was compromised. Cyberterrorism tools such as port scanners were found in our system. These tools were not detected prior to the investigation.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is Incharge of shielding our country’s crucial infrastructure from physical and cyber dangers. Of the varied kinds of infrastructure, cyberspace is crucial constituting the information regarding the government and business operations, crisis management and readiness information, and our crucial digital and process control systems. Safeguarding these critical resources and infrastructure is

Accordingly, this document has been developed to provide information regarding DTL Power and the measures that have been developed and implemented to safeguard its information and information systems from a cyber threat. This document is broken down into several sections that will provide an analysis of DTL Power and the energy sector; as well as the effectiveness of cybersecurity technology/policies in the energy sector, the team’s cyber strategy, and budget.

The Department of Homeland Security supplies a national protection plan concerning critical infrastructure security. This plan targets a wide audience, including public and private critical infrastructure owners and administrators. Managing risks through identifying, deterring, and disrupting threats to critical infrastructure is the direct focus of this plan. The ability of an organization to reduce the impact of a threat that has occurred and reducing the impact of one that may occur is essential to an active security posture. Compromise of a critical infrastructure such as oil, airports, or traffic flow management could result in a major loss of life or resources (Department of Homeland Security, 2013).

Managing these risks involves developing approaches that result in sound, scenario-based consequence and vulnerability estimates as well as assessments of the likelihood that the suggested threat will occur (“Executing A Critical”, n.d.). Risk is influenced by the nature and magnitude of a hazard or threat, the vulnerabilities to the threat or hazard, and possible consequences (“Executing A Critical”, n.d.). The threat landscape of the electric utility subsector includes physical attacks/theft, cyber-attack, natural disaster, and nuclear attacks (“Addressing Dynamic”, 2014). In addition to these threats and vulnerabilities, the subsector has identified other key issues and risks such as workforce capability and human errors, equipment failure and aging infrastructure, and evolving environmental, economic, and reliability regulatory requirements (“Energy Sector”, 2015). Electricity assets are numerous including residential homes, commercial offices, utility companies, transmission lines, etc. and their locations vary across the

Cyber security is a major concern for every department, business, and citizen of the United States because technology impacts every aspect of our daily lives. The more we use technology the more complacent, we get with the information that is stored within our cyber networks. The more complacent, we get, the more vulnerable we become to cyber-attacks because we fail to update the mechanisms that safeguard our information. Breaches to security networks are detrimental to personal, economic, and national security information. Many countries, like Russia, China, Israel, France, and the United Kingdom, now have the abilities and technology to launch cyber-attacks on the United States. In the last five years there have been several attacks on cyber systems to gain access to information maintained by major businesses and the United States Government. Cyber-attacks cause serious harm to the United States’ economy, community, and the safety, so we need to build stronger cyber security mechanisms. Based on my theoretical analysis, I recommend the following:

To detect a cyberattack on the power grid, Western Interconnection should implement a system that will allow public and private authorities to receive Indications and Warning (I&W) when a cyberattack is in its early phase. Koester and Cohen (2012) discuss their Electric Power Grid Indications & Warning Tool in their paper. The purpose of this tool is “to provide near real-time I&W to alert private and public sector authorities when the likely causes of outage events are malicious activity.” (Koester & Cohen, 2012, p. 1). The tool minimizes false alarms due to severe weather and high temperatures. Implementing this solution will allow administrators at the Western Interconnection power grid to take precautionary measures as necessary. For example, the substations can be manually shutdown in case of a cyberattack, to prevent potential damage and spread of malware.

The 2003 northeast blackout that saw about 50 million people from the northeast US and southeast Canada lose power for about 2 days at the cost of $6 billion dollars according to JR Minkel (Minkle) and was the biggest blackout in North American history (Minkle). The disaster lead to a report that showed the blackout was caused by a combination of human error and equipment failure. To prevent issues like this in the future a “smart grid” needs to be developed that would monitor and repair itself in the event of problems. Essentially computers and applications would be the first responder when there is an equipment failure on the grid. The problem with this solution is that by placing more of the control of the power grid into the hands of computers and applications, it opens up the grid to cyber-attacks. The economic impact of a total or even partial failure of the power grid is astronomical and makes a very appealing target to those who wish to cause

To ensure that the Western Interconnection power grid computer network is properly secured, there needs to be strong defense-in-depth strategies in place. Although they may be strong defense-in-depth strategies, vulnerabilities may be present and used as an advantage point for hackers to gain access to the network. Defense-in-depth strategies will help create risk management to assess certain risks that may be proven as detrimental to a network.

In today’s world technology has evolved to the point where a large amount of information is stored in cyberspace. It is because of this type of storage people around the world have an easier time at accessing information than ever before. The time before the late 20th century gathering information was long and tedious to get a book that the library did not own would take at least a couple of weeks depending on the time period or it may not have been possible to obtain that book. But now people can access a vast amount of information in a matter of minutes. Example, in modern times if someone wanted to know about a different culture they could simple look up the information on a computer or any device that had access to

Introduction: - for my research project, I would like to explore about the cyber security measures. Cybersecurity covers the fundamental concepts underlying the construction of secure systems from the hardware to the software to the human computer interface, with the use of cryptography to secure interactions. These concepts are easily augmented with hands-on exercises involving relevant tools and techniques. We have different types of computer related crimes, cybercrimes, computer related offenses, federal approaches defenses. The information resources management has the technical matters for which IT are widely known. Cyber resources and cyber power as well as cyber security. We have spent a lot of time talking about many different high level critical infrastructure protection concepts we have general rule stayed away from cyber security explaining the ins and out of how the NIPP and NRF work together to ensure that we can live our daily live in relative comfort.

Discussion point 2: SCADA networks consists of many computers and software’s which performs many tasks and services in the organization or infrastructure which are considered to be backbone of the country which requires major protection from many cyber threats. In industrialized countries, precise census of SCADA systems is absent which is a big concern. Recently Incident Illinois on alleged water facility incident and Stuxnet virus proves that

The damage of a full-fledged cyber attack would be devastating, the destruction would be unparalleled to any other tragedy that has occurred America. Since technology is responsible for providing America with vital entities and resources, an unadulterated cyber attack would nearly fail the American economy; this is what is known as critical systems failure. Weapons of mass destruction and cyber attacks present imminent threats of critical systems failure. Although currently Americas’ critical infrastructures are coordinated by controlled systems, majority of these systems are indeed connected to the American cyberspace. This exposes one of America’s most vulnerable spot amidst cyber security. Another major vulnerable spot within the nations IT security would be the geographical physical location for each of Americas primary infrastructures, as well as their productivity. Due to the proximal locations, the major infrastructures could very well be infiltrated by one efficient CNA.

In the previous five years, cybersecurity has turned into the most looked for after calling around the world. More than 90 percent of respondents to an overview directed by the Ponemon Institute (2011) detailed being a casualty to cyberattacks amid the most recent year, costing all things considered more than $2 million for each association. This number keeps on ascending as the two programmers and security devices progress. As indicated by PwC, roughly 33% of all U.S. organizations are as of now utilizing digital protection (Lindros and Tittel, 2016).