Securing Our Nation’s Critical Infrastructure Is Everyone’s Responsibility

In Week 4 of #CyberAware Month we’re emphasizing the importance of securing our critical infrastructure and highlighting the roles the public can play in keeping it safe. A nation-wide pizza chain made news in 2018 by announcing a new contest: nominate your town for pothole repair. The very endearing marketing tactic asked customers around the country to explain why their town deserves a little roadway TLC in order to keep pizzas from bouncing around the car on the way to their tables. One winner would be chosen, and the chain would fund pothole repair for that city. As fun as that sounds, maintaining and protecting our infrastructure isn’t a game, especially when it comes to the real threat of cyber attacks. These coordinated attacks can disable anything from our power grid, telecommunications and E-911 systems, water supply and sewage and more. Taking down even one of these vital utilities with a cyber attack would have devastating consequences while targeting more than one system could cripple entire sections of the country. October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, a project hosted by StaySafeOnline. This year’s theme is “Our Shared Responsibility,” and each weekly theme focuses on how consumers, businesses, and stakeholders can play key roles in protecting against hacking, data breaches, and other related crimes. But how are members of the public supposed to prevent a large-scale hacking event that aims infrastructure? It’s one thing to update your home computer’s antivirus or log out of your sensitive accounts when you’re not using them, but those behaviors will hardly stop highly-skilled operatives from threatening a country’s water supply. Or can they? Can the security behaviors you adopt prevent the next widespread cybercrime? StaySafeOnline certainly thinks so, and will offer crucial information to the public on ways that they can take an active role in securing our country’s infrastructure: “Our day-to-day life depends on the country’s 16 sectors of critical infrastructure, which supply food, water, financial services, public health, communications and power along with other networks and systems. A disruption to this system, which is operated via the internet, can have significant and even catastrophic consequences for our nation.” One of the most obvious ways that consumers can protect these necessary resources starts with protecting their own networks. Your home computer, your smartphone, and your Internet-of-Things connected devices are all sources of potential vulnerabilities. If you’re in any way connected to the public utilities—even theoretically something as mundane as paying your electric or water bill online—it could result in fraudulent access to the utilities if hackers gain access through your computer. By securing your own devices and networks first, you’re possibly preventing a cybercriminal from compromising your device and using that connection to gain access to a “bigger fish.” Third-party attacks, commonly associated with small businesses who have connections to larger corporations, are a recognized avenue of attack. The Black Friday data breach that affected Target in 2013, for example, was eventually traced back to a third-party vendor who worked on the refrigeration units for a small number of Target locations. Safeguarding your own network and devices is always a smart thing to do, and it can prevent a lot of headaches for you down the road. In today’s connected digital climate; however, your own security steps just might protect us all.

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