Control + Alt + Delete

I happened to read a cartoon which said: “Don’t underestimate the I.Q of crooks “. It made me ponder about the prevalent issues of Cyber Security which have bogged the society in the current times.

In August 2013, hackers supposedly disrupted the NASDAQ trading market and the market had to be shut off for more than 3 hours. A problematic issue showed up in a quote processing system which brought the technical glitch into light. This issue instigated a lot of questions arising in the minds of the investors who now doubt the over dependence on technology for their trading. This kind of attack could be performed at the blink of an eye by a person who is miles away. There are several other breaches which are possible like the attacker could alter the trading algorithm which in turn could cause the market to crash. The worldwide impact would be unimaginable if at all a cyber-attacker could gain access to NASDAQ computers.

As a matter of fact, we are prone to cyber-attack all the time. We use Cloud services, smart phones, for internet banking, social networking sites to interact with friends all over the world. All this has only complicated the process of achieving Cyber security. The world is more interconnected today than it was before and the usage of the Internet is woven into the fabric of our daily lives.

 " Viruses --> have spawned malware and subsequently malwares have gobbled up Trojans, and spyware. "

       Listed below are the techniques which all of can use in our day-to-day lives to protect ourselves from Cyber crimes.

• Install a good Anti-Virus program on your   PC and smart-phones which detects viruses and removes them. 
• Set really complex and strong  passwords 
• Try not to open mails from unknown sources. Also prevent opening attachments in mails from unknown sources.
• Do not download "exe" files from the internet and be careful about the websites that you visit and the links that you click.

• 
   Limit the amount of personal information that is posted online. Also use privacy settings to ensure personal information is not shared across everyone.
• Be cautious about online deals. If it is too good to be true then probably it's not true! 
• It's important to ensure that your computer and routers are installed with good firewalls. 
• Public WiFi's send data which is not encrypted so avoid using Public WiFi connections.

And finally : Lock your Computer!!                                                                                         
Once a cyber incident occurs, the action plan to handle the same should be ready. The IEEE paper by Gregory White throws more light in this direction.
In the National Cyber Incident Response Plan [1], the cyber incident response cycle has five phases: Prevent and Protect, Detect, Analyze, Respond and Resolve

Prevent and protect: Routine information sharing within a community is necessary to the prevent and protect phase.

Detect : When prevention and protection efforts are not successful, collaborative information sharing should be established for detecting malicious and unauthorized activities.

Analyze: The analysis of information determines the impact, scope and severity of an incident.

Response: Routine information sharing and incident specific information sharing are required. 

Resolve: The response effectiveness needs to be evaluated to make sure that the desired outcome has been made. 

     The famous saying "Prevention is better than cure " can be applied to Cyber security as well because the if valuable data is compromised, the loss is inexplicable!

      References : 
  http://kb.iu.edu/data/akln.html
  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6568387
  http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6284146
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/22/us-nasdaq-halt-tapec-idUSBRE97L0V420130822