Why all the focus on cyberspace cybersecurity and cyberwarfare?

Answer 1

In 2009, cybercrime surpassed the drug trade in terms of overall revenue, so it's easy to see the seriousness of the activity. For every operating system, application, and even file type, there are vulnerabilities which can be exploited by worms, viruses, malware, script kiddies, organized crime, and attacks by foreign entities. To protect ourselves, we rely upon the skills and abilities of IT security teams.

Notable security incidents include the TJ Maxx and Home Depot wireless security breaches, in which criminals drove around sniffing networks, broke the feeble WEP encryption, and stole millions of credit card numbers. A Veterans Affairs employee left a laptop on the back seat of his vehicle - it was stolen, along with the PII of millions of veterans. The bomber of the World Trade Center also used PGP to encrypt his communications with other planners (this is well before 9/11).

To protect against these types of incidents, cybersecurity personnel focus on awareness training, security policy development, instituting best practices for access control and authentication, cryptography, malicious software, intrusion detection and prevention, and overall network topology. The many fields of cybersecurity produces specialists

Unfortunately, there are far fewer security personnel than there are criminals, which is why cybersecurity professionals are so highly sought after (and paid). The US Government has indicated that computer security vacancies are a critical field, and are subject to direct hire, and DoD 8570 compliance states that IT personnel will be paid premiums for their security certifications.

Most recently, the United States Army's new CyberCommand at Ft. Meade, MD is the new home of the Dept. of Defense's breeding ground for cyber operators. Although an autonomous command, CyberCommand will have some overlap with the NSA in their duty to protect DoD networks, suggest policies for civilian entities, and even infiltrate other foreign governments in the event of a cyberwar.

The United States is not the only government to have such a command - the recent attack on Google is thought to be an action of the Chinese government. Computers built overseas are often discovered to have components which may supply information to the originating country - in effect, the foreign states are asking companies to install hardware which can spy on users.

It's not safe out there - a new out of the box Dell can be compromised within 15 minutes once connected to a network. NIST has documentation on how to protect your computers, although some functionality may be lost. The NSA provides manuals on locking down Windows based computers, and surprisingly, recommend Apple's own security manual for locking down Apple computers.