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Cybersecurity isn't a new topic making the rounds in Washington. In 2007, the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th President, within the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was tasked with examining public policy and issues surrounding cybersecurity and developing recommendations for its improvement. According to the commission's executive summary, the vulnerability of computer networks has become a national security problem. With vast amounts of personal information floating around on the Internet, people are constantly at risk for identity theft and the ripple effect of stolen money. The federal government has even more at stake than bank account numbers and birth dates, though. In addition to the appointment of the cyberczar, the Department of Defense plans to establish a U.S. Cyber Command Center to combat the tide of online threats against its networks and classified government data. The recent series of cyber-attacks on July 4, 2009, highlighted why we need online safeguards. That weekend, government and public Web sites in the United States and South Korea were assaulted with denial-of-service attacks (DoS), which are essentially virus programs that flood sites with traffic and temporarily disable them.
While the North Korea allegation hasn't been confirmed, the hackers targeted at least nine U.S. White House, Treasury Department and National Security Agency (which is, incidentally, where the future U.S. In South Korea, the DoS attacks clogged more than 20 sites. Harassing a handful of Web sites is one thing, but does one hacker have the technological wherewithal to bring down an entire country's network? In a word: yes. In March 2009, a 22-year-old Russian named Konstantin Goloskokov admitted to rallying a group of pro-Kremlin friends to launch a series of cyber-attacks against Estonian Web sites two years prior. Rioting broke out in Estonia in the spring of 2007 after government workers relocated a commemorative World War II statue of a Soviet soldier. As the fighting in streets calmed, a second wave of aggression cropped up in cyberspace. According to Goloskokov, he and a group of friends directed enormous streams of data to Estonian government, bank and media Web sites, effectively crippling the nation's Internet access off and on from April 26 to May 18, 2007. With DDoS attacks, hackers use other people's computers, sometimes halfway across the globe, to wreak virtual havoc.
To launch DDoS attacks, hackers first access other people's computers through zombie applications, malicious software that overrides security measures or creates an entry point. Once hackers gain control over so-called zombie computers, they can network them together to form cyber-armies, or botnets. The Estonian attack relied on vast botnets to send the coordinated crash-inducing data to the Web servers. Just how much damage did that small group of hackers carry out? Goloskokov, the cyber-attack mastermind, claimed the siege was a form of civil disobedience, rather than criminal behavior. Whatever the intent, the incident demonstrated the tremendous power that a remote group of hackers can wield. Especially considering that Estonia is one of the most wired nations on the globe, the implications for what could happen to larger and arguably less sophisticated networks in, say, the United States seem rather grave. In 2000, the Estonian government adopted Internet access as a basic human right.
But as hackers hone their skills, the Baltic nation may have to fight to defend it. First of all, anything with “web,” “cloud,” “smart,” and “live” would become useless and non-functional. A lot of apps on your phone or computer rely on internet access to do what you want them to do. With the entire internet gone, they would be left adrift.Jun 8, 2022What if the internet shut down forever? Apr 29, 2021 What would happen if Google was shut down? Firstly, the internet itself would not shut down, but Google might be closed. Google is an American multinational technology company. The company is known for its Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. How do I stop my internet from going out all the time? Keep your WiFi router away from common interferences.Use 2.4GHz channels. … Reduce interference from other Wireless networks and devices. … Reduce interference from microwaves, cordless phones, and other devices running on the 2.4GHz band. … Turn off WiFi Network Mode. … Reduce the number of active WiFi devices using the network. Can the government shut down the Internet? There is no law that gives the United States authority over an ISP without a court order. … The regulations that the United States uses to regulate the information service industry may have inadvertently made a true “Internet kill switch” impossible. How do viruses and worms spread over e-mail? Could hackers devastate the U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity for the Office of the 44th President.
Globalization is a hot buzzword in the media right now, and for good reason. Many corporations are have operations worldwide. A large company might have offices on multiple continents. And some large companies are making unprecedented alliances with competitors. While face-to-face interactions still play an important role in conducting business, it's just not possible to limit all collaborative projects to personal meetings. That's why many companies are looking into online collaboration. Online collaboration uses the Internet as a common meeting and work space. Instead of sitting in a physical conference room, employees access virtual work environments. That work space might be a shared database in which employees can store and access data in a collaborative way, or it might be as complex as a full-fledged virtual environment. They save their work in a shared database, and everyone works from the same files and data. Not only are there technical challenges that companies must address when investing in online collaboration, but there are also social concerns.
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