Cyberwarfare, cyber attacks, hacking, and ransomware have been making the headlines at an increasing pace. Recent attacks have spanned everything from data theft to crippling infrastructure.
Everything from oil pipelines, food processing plants, and public utilities like water treatment plants have been compromised by online attacks. With the news that ransoms have been paid by these companies, these attacks seem only likely to increase. Preparing for a cyber attack and cyberwarfare is becoming more and more important.
In the 2000s and 2010s, many cyberattacks focused on financial records, health records, and personal data on social media. Cyber threats appear to have jumped up in intensity and are shifting from data theft to large-scale disruptions.
Cyber terrorism and threats to the infrastructure have always existed. However, cyber threats become more crippling as we connect new devices to the internet. Every year devices you never thought would be connected to the internet get an upgrade. The TV, your lights, the thermostat, and even the toilet can now be connected! Is nothing sacred anymore?
We love the added convenience. Who doesn’t enjoy coming home to the perfect temperature? But, at the cost of increased convenience is an ever-increasingly interwoven infrastructure (say that three times fast). This makes streamlined services run smoothly, however, when one part collapses, it takes the whole system down.
Before we jump into cyberattack preparation and prevention, let’s look at a few more potential targets. The target list for cyber crime and cyberwarfare is almost limitless.
What are potential cyber attack targets?
- Transportation: Trains/Planes/Toll Booths/Draw Bridges/Pipelines
- Power Plants
- Water Treatment Plants
- Food Industry
- Health Care
- Inventory and Warehousing (Amazon, food & essential suppliers, UPS)
- Social Media & News Stations
- Private Sector Business
- Financial Areas such as Banking and the Stock Market
Planning for any disaster can begin by just following the sequence of events. If event “A” happened, what would it cause? What should I have to be prepared for that cause?
How to prevent Cyber Attacks
An organization’s or government’s cybersecurity can come down to their individual employee’s cyber awareness. We all have a role to play in cybersecurity. When an individual’s account is hacked, companies and nations become compromised. Remember the old saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? That saying is pretty accurate here too!
Here are some cybersecurity steps you can take.
Protecting your Email
Emails have been a notorious weak spot for all kinds of hacks and exploits. Don’t open an email you don’t recognize, especially if it has an enticing offer. Your long-lost relative overseas didn’t die and leave you a fortune, the IT department will never ask for your password, and anything with the word free is likely best moved to the trash or spam folder.
If something compromised your work computer, let your employer know. If you are attending school, the IT department will appreciate a heads up too. One infected computer can compromise the entire network.
P@sswords
P@ssword, Qwerty1!, and 123456 just don’t cut it anymore. Websites continue trying to make you come up with new and unique passwords (16 characters, a symbol, a capital letter, an Egyptian hieroglyph) to keep your data safe.
Password managers are convenient. Sign up for their services and you only have to remember one password! However, be careful, having all your passwords tied up with one account leads to the potential for a massive single-point failure. You may have some trouble if you get locked out of your account or if their servers go down!
Web browsers will often offer to save your passwords in the browser as well! This can be pretty handy, but it only takes about 5 seconds and minimal HTML knowledge to reveal the password. It should be relatively safe if you are the only one to use your computer and it is always locked. Never save a password on a public or shared computer.
Two-factor authentication
Turning on two-factor authentication is a great way to make your accounts more secure at work and home. Two-factor authentication requires you to verify you are logging in by responding to a phone call, text, email, or notification before logging into the system. Yes, it’s an extra hassle, but it is a huge security improvement.
Find My iPhone/Device
Both iPhone and android offer a remote service to locate a lost or stolen phone. You can track its location, lock it, or even wipe the phone’s memory. If you have sensitive data on it, you could clear it if your device were ever to fall into the wrong hands.
You’ll need to have the service set up on your phone before you can use it. To set this feature up go here for Apple users and here for Android users.
Sketchy Sites or JDLR
JDLR stands for just doesn’t look right. It’s normally used in security training scenarios for just having a bad feeling about something. You may not be able to put your finger on what’s wrong, but something feels off. Back out and find a different way to accomplish what you wanted if you ever get that feeling on a website or in an email.
Anti-virus Software
Keeping up on your antivirus protection is a must these days. There are many options out there including a free option by AVG.
VPN (Virtual Private Network)
VPNs have exploded in popularity over the last decade, mostly because we can access different countries’ video streaming options. They can also greatly increase your security. VPNs as the name implies route your internet browsing through a virtual private network, encrypting all the traffic from the connection. They can also make your connection appear as if it is in another location. For more information on VPNs check out this article by Norton.
Quarantining infected devices
Do not plug your backups into your device if you suspect it was infected, or you lost your data! Keep it isolated from the rest of your systems (Wi-Fi, cellphone, USBs) so that a virus or ransomware doesn’t spread to them as well. Now would be a good time to take it to a professional.
Preparing for a Cyber Attacks and cyberwarfare
Disasters thrive on single-point failures. One explosion in Nashville knocked multiple 911 systems offline. A man with an excavator dug in the wrong location and cut the internet for hundreds of thousands. Every time a single-point failure occurs, it shows a flaw in our system.
Having a password manager can be great. However, using a password manager that goes down for a week and not knowing any of your passwords is not great.
Having your electrical grid connected to other power plants to operate correctly is great, that electric grid collapsing in a cascading event that takes out power for 55 million people is not.
Redundancy is expensive, especially in the economy we have built around just-in-time deliveries and lean running production.
The great news is the effects of single-point failures can be reduced with just a little extra time spent on our part. We can also protect ourselves from being affected as drastically as others if a large-scale cyberwarfare attack occurs.
Back Up Your Data
You have several options for backing up your data. Each has pros and cons.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage can be great protection against natural disasters. When you have all your files backed up online in a remote location you greatly decrease the chance of losing all of your data. Each copy of data you make exposes you to more risk. Choose a respected cloud service and know none is completely secure.
Physical Backup
A USB drive or a backup hard drive doesn’t take up much room and could be placed in a safe for even more physical protection.
Sensitive files should be encrypted to protect them in case they are stolen.
Medical records and current prescriptions should be included on your backup as well. Have a hard copy of these!
If you want to get serious, you can archive the internet. Sign up to be included on our email list to be one of the first to know when that article arrives.
Social Media Backup
Sites like Facebook allow you to download all the information they have collected on you as well as the data you have uploaded to them. To me, it’s a little reassuring to know that I have the same data that they have. You can find their instructions here.
Keep A Physical Hard Copy
The best computer hacker in the world can’t access the copy of your passport and insurance in your safe unless they’ve trained one of those dancing Boston dynamic robots or dogs to find and retrieve it.
Tips FOR surviving cyberwarfare
The basics of any good preparation tactic are to follow the logical progression of a possible event. A snowstorm is in the forecast, so you know milk and bread will be sold out. The goal with preparation is to remove you from the list of individuals that need to run to the store for milk and bread. Living in a state of preparedness allows you a level of relaxation others don’t have.
Food, Water, and Fuel
With cyber-attacks increasingly focusing on infrastructure, it’s a good time to have a few things on hand. Two weeks of food and water is the recommended amount of supply to have on hand for disasters.
Stocking up prevents panic buying. If you keep your car fueled up, you won’t be waiting in a three-hour line for gas. By keeping a couple of weeks of groceries, you won’t be as worried about meat processing plants being shut down. If you have two weeks’ worth of water at home, a cyber attack on a water treatment facility won’t be as disruptive.
Have Cash Available
If a cyberattack hits the financial sector, cash will become extremely important. Swiping a card is convenient but if your bank is hacked or the service responsible for debit and credit card transactions goes down, your credit card won’t be worth anything.
Keep your bills small too! A ten-dollar item will cost you $100 if that’s the only change you and the vendor have.
Sanitation
We may not want to think about it, but if the water or sewer stops flowing, things will get ugly fast. Do you have a way to use the restroom without water? Hand sanitizer for cleaning your hands, wet wipes for bathing, and a camping toilet work as an alternative?
Power Outage and Grid Failure
You may wait awhile for services to be restored if a cyber attack is successfully carried out on the power grid. A generator is a good backup for some of the basic needs and a good excuse to have an extra can of fuel around. For more tips on preparing for a power outage, check out this article.
Communication Alternatives
Social media has become a staple for much of our communication. Again, though, we’re trying to avoid having all our eggs in one basket. Do you have a number for your Facebook friends or do you just use the app to talk to them? I’m not a fan of social media, but that doesn’t keep me from using it all the time. I do most of my communication through it. If you were to suffer a major outage, do you have your friend’s number saved on your phone? Now might be a good time to get their cell phone number.
Radios are limited to line of sight and normally work about 2-5 miles tops from a good radio unless you have your ham radio license and can link up to a repeater network.
Pass your ham radio test first try with these resources!
Smoke signals anyone?
Navigation Options
If you decide to travel, having a physical map can be a tremendous advantage. An offline map program can be useful while you’re able to keep your phone powered too.
Open Street Map is a free-to-use software with many apps available to download the map files offline.
Civil Unrest
If a cyber threat sparks civil unrest, there are several ways you can protect yourself. We’ve written an article for that as well that you can find here.
Is it just me?
Down Detector is a great site to check and see if others are having a problem with a website too. Oh, and Twitter users are always more than happy to let the world know when sites go down, especially when it’s Facebook! If it is a large disruptive cyber attack, it will probably start trending quickly, unless it’s Twitter itself under attack.
Conclusion
We all run a balance between convenience and risk. Redundancy has not been built into many systems. With increasing reliance, also comes decreased resilience.
With increasing reliance also comes decreased resilience.
-Red Sky Ready
New technologies like quantum computing will make our current encryption protocols obsolete. Quantum computing is still in its infancy for now. However, as nations invest huge amounts of resources at this new technology, cyberwarfare could easily determine the fate of nations.
Cybersecurity requires constant evolution to keep pace with new flaws being exposed and new viruses being released. By taking a few simple steps, we can prevent many of the common attacks. With cyber attacks and ransomware, an ounce of prevention may be worth much more than a pound of cure. With cyberwarfare, an ounce of prevention may just mean the difference between life and death.
Join our email to hear about new resources to help you stay on top of severe weather outbreaks
- How to Shelter in Place During a Nuclear Event
- How to sleep in your car overnight
- How to prepare for power outages
- Preparing for Severe Weather
- How to Help Someone Who is on Fire
- How To Get Help When 9-1-1 Is Down
- Does a Solar Eclipse Really Warrant a State of Emergency?
- The Coming Digital Apocalypse?
- Disaster Survival: Do These 3 Things Within 60 Seconds
- 5 Disaster Relief Tips for a Major Earthquake Response
- Can We Shoot the Chinese Balloon Down?
- Incident Management Team: Tips for a Successful Deployment
- TC001 Best New Thermal Camera? Review for TOPDON TCView
- 5 Ways To Stop Overpaying For Healthcare
- Preparing Your Pets for Disaster
- Is International Travel Safe? How To Reduce Your Risks While Traveling Abroad
Join our email to hear about new resources to help you stay on top of severe weather outbreaks
Pingback: How to Prepare for a Power Outage & Grid Failure - Red Sky Ready
Pingback: Google-Fi the best phone plan for international travelers - Red Sky Ready