Joseph Steinberg - Cybersecurity For Dummies

With the low cost of launching repeated attacks, the odds of eventual success in their favor, the odds of getting caught and punished miniscule, and the potential rewards growing with increased digitalization, criminals know that cybercrime pays, underscoring the reason that you need to protect yourself.

People sometimes explain the reason that cybersecurity is important as being “because it prevent hackers from breaking into systems and stealing data and money.” But such a description dramatically understates the role that cybersecurity plays in keeping the modern home, business, or even world running, and in keeping humans safe from physical harm.

In fact, the role of cybersecurity can be looked at from a variety of different vantage points, with each presenting a different set of goals. Of course the following lists aren’t complete, but they should provide food for thought and underscore the importance of understanding how to cybersecure yourself and your loved ones.

Cybersecurity professionals often explain that the goal of cybersecurity is to ensure the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of data, sometimes referred to as the CIA Triad, with the pun lovingly intended:

Confidentiality refers to ensuring that information isn’t disclosed or in any other way made available to unauthorized entities (including people, organizations, or computer processes). Don’t confuse confidentiality with privacy: Confidentiality is a subset of the realm of privacy. It deals specifically with protecting data from unauthorized viewers, whereas privacy in general encompasses much more.Hackers that steal data undermine confidentiality.

Integrity refers to ensuring that data is both accurate and complete. Accurate means, for example, that the data is never modified in any way by any unauthorized party or by a technical glitch. Complete refers to, for example, data that has had no portion of itself removed by any unauthorized party or technical glitch.Integrity also includes ensuring nonrepudiation, meaning that data is created and handled in such a fashion that nobody can reasonably argue that the data is not authentic or is inaccurate.Cyberattacks that intercept data and modify it before relaying it to its destination — sometimes known as man-in-the-middle attacks — undermine integrity.

Availability refers to ensuring that information, the systems used to store and process it, the communication mechanisms used to access and relay it, and all associated security controls function correctly to meet some specific benchmark (for example, 99.99 percent uptime). People outside of the cybersecurity field sometimes think of availability as a secondary aspect of information security after confidentiality and integrity. In fact, ensuring availability is an integral part of cybersecurity. Doing so, though, is sometimes more difficult than ensuring confidentiality or integrity. One reason that this is true is that maintaining availability often requires involving many more noncybersecurity professionals, leading to a “too many cooks in the kitchen” type challenge, especially in larger organizations. Distributed denial-of-service attacks attempt to undermine availability. Also, consider that attacks often use large numbers of stolen computer power and bandwidth to launch DDoS attacks, but responders who seek to ensure availability can only leverage the relatively small amount of resources that they can afford.

The risks that cybersecurity addresses can also be thought of in terms better reflecting the human experience:

Privacy risks: Risks emanating from the potential loss of adequate control over, or misuse of, personal or other confidential information.

Financial risks: Risks of financial losses due to hacking. Financial losses can include both those that are direct — for example, the theft of money from someone’s bank account by a hacker who hacked into the account — and those that are indirect, such as the loss of customers who no longer trust a small business after the latter suffers a security breach.

Professional risks: Risks to one’s professional career that stem from breaches. Obviously, cybersecurity professionals are at risk for career damage if a breach occurs under their watch and is determined to have happened due to negligence, but other types of professionals can suffer career harm due to a breach as well. C-level executives can be fired, board members can be sued, and so on. Professional damage can also occur if hackers release private communications or data that shows someone in a bad light — for example, records that a person was disciplined for some inappropriate action, sent an email containing objectionable material, and so on.

Business risks: Risks to a business similar to the professional risks to an individual. Internal documents leaked after breach of Sony Pictures painted various the firm in a negative light vis-à-vis some of its compensation practices.

Personal risks: Many people store private information on their electronic devices, from explicit photos to records of participation in activities that may not be deemed respectable by members of their respective social circles. Such data can sometimes cause significant harm to personal relationships if it leaks. Likewise, stolen personal data can help criminals steal people’s identities, which can result in all sorts of personal problems.

Physical danger risks: Cyberattacks on sewage treatment plants, utilities, and hospitals in recent years have shown clearly that the failure to maintain cybersecurity can lead to the endangering of human lives. For example, in 2020, a woman in Germany died while being transported between hospitals after the hospital at which she had been a patient was struck by ransomware. And in 2021, a lawsuit was filed arguing that a baby died as a result of medical mistakes made as she was born at a hospital in Alabama during system outages caused by a ransomware attack.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring attacks that can inflict damage

Discovering the difference between impersonation, data interception, and data theft

Looking at the various types of malware, poisoning, and malvertising

Finding out about advanced forms of cyberattacks

Many different types of cyberattacks exist — so many that I could write an entire series of books about them and add many new chapters every year. In this book, however, I do not cover all types of threats in detail because the reality is, you’re likely reading this book to learn about how to keep yourself cybersecure, not to learn about matters that have no impact on you, such as forms of attacks that are normally directed at espionage agencies, industrial equipment, or military armaments.

In this chapter, you find out about the different types of problems that cyberattackers can create through the use of attacks that commonly impact individuals and small businesses.