Transportation is a very important part of everyone’s life and preventing attacks on transportation is of equal importance. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency even lists transportation as one of the essential government sectors.
Any hindrance of transportation can cause a lot of problems. Transportation has become such an easy target for cyber attacks because of how it operates. The transportation industry hosts a massive amount of documents ranging from freight invoices to customs declarations.
Due to all the electronic documents, transportation is a target for bad actors. The transportation industry is under constant attack and has to make use of end to end encryption to protect their documents.
Whether the electrical grid, a dam or an airport, more and more infrastructure is becoming an attack target. Terrorism and espionage has evolved dramatically from the use of physical devices to destroy critical infrastructure. In today’s new global cold war, cyber terrorism is a much greater threat. Your enemies do not need to physically damage a power plant to shut down the grid, rather just hack into it. Hacking also is proving to be more effective and is a more intrusive means of affecting national security.
The risks are exponentially greater for infrastructure projects than say a typical attack against a business. When attacking a business, quite often the motivation is simply financial gain and/or competitive advantage. With governmental infrastructure programs, the risk is to the citizens that might be effected by the attack. For example, in 2015, the power grid in Ukraine was repeatedly shut down by cyber attacks. In March of 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that the US energy sector was attacked as a means of shutting down natural gas pipelines. The attack disrupted operations across various critical systems operators, which meant that an entire pipeline involved was shut down for two days. Australian infrastructure has seen repeated and frequent attacks over the past year.
The bottom-line, is that for national security, data needs to be protected not just to avoid data leakage and the costs involved, but to ensure control and command.
From The Shadows Emerges Knowledge
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Article contributed by Anthony DiTaranto
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