Vulnerability - Admission/Application Essay Example

Vulnerability Vulnerability to Cyber terrorism This can be defined as the use of computers as weapons and targets by politically influenced nations or clandestine agents who threaten to cause violence and fear so that they can influence and force governments to change their policies in a way that can favor them. This can be used to describe the three types of cyber attacks including the EA, CAN and the physical attacks against computers.Some of the United States critical infrastructures which are considered vulnerable to terrorist attack include energy, public health, transportation, banking and finance, human services, water, information and telecommunication among others.

Since nations’ resources are nowadays directly or indirectly controlled by computer systems which are then interconnected with a complex network of interdependence hence the unprecedented levels of vulnerability and infrastructural risk through compromise of those computers, cyber-terrorism has emerged as a real world concern (Lewis, 2006). Operations can be disrupted causing damage to these vital infrastructures due to a vulnerability. Several attacks have been seen directed against the US critical infrastructure including the newly released ‘’Blaster’’ worm of 2003 which caused major disruptions of several computers in during the month of August.

The severity of the Eastern United States power blackout on 14th August could have also been contributed to by this attack. This could have through lowering the performance of several communication lines used to link the utility company data centers, sending warnings to other managers downstream on the power grid. Another example in 2003 was that of a ‘’Slammer’’ attack which occurred when the ‘’Slammer’’ worm was released for five hours to corrupt the computer control systems which was at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio.

This was fortunately rescued by the fact that by the time the attack took place, the power plant was closed hence was off-line. However, the worm successfully penetrated the several systems in the Davis-Besse power plant control room to a larger extent given that the business network for its corporate offices had a multiple internet connection to bypass the control room firewall.Several measures can be taken to avoid these attacks for instance employing a program known as Critical Infrastructure protection (CIP) to safeguard the United States security and defend them against intruders of the infrastructure.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of US puts in place the following recommendations to deal with cyber-terrorism; conducting threat vulnerability assessment, coming up with strategic analysis and warning capabilities in order to identify potential cyber attacks, protection to infrastructure control system, enhancing public or private information sharing and facilitating plan of recovery together with the recovery of the internet in case the disruption is enormous.ReferencesLewis, J. A. (2006). Cyber security and Critical Infrastructure Protection.

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