Digital Information Environment
56 Cybersecurity
Bryce Moritz
introduction
The first prototype of the Internet came in the 1960s (Andrews, 2013). In about 1990 this entity would take on a form recognizable as the modern internet. Since its creation, the prevalence of the online community in our lives has grown exponentially; much of our business, social interactions, schoolwork and personal information are not only conducted online but also stored there. One of the major appeals of the internet is its easy access and vast memory; attributes like these make activities like online banking much faster and easier than before. While the internet has shaped much of our lives for the last 20-30 years, there are drawbacks to a world wide web… Data being so easily accessible nowadays is easily exploited, for example, in 2016 cyber-criminals managed to steal and abuse the credit card data of 48% of Americans (Reducing Personal Cybersecurity Risk, 2019). The cybersecurity industry has therefore been required to develop alongside the internet to keep users and their information safe as their lifestyles have changed with these advancements. Without cybersecurity many of the internet’s uses are unsafe and unrealistic.
Cybersecurity today
According to Global Market Insights, by the year 2024 cybersecurity will be a $300 billion industry (Bhutani & Wadhwani, 2019). This projection is based on the assumed growth of the internet over the next 5 years and it is not unprecedented. Many of the technological features we use in our everyday life are still relatively young, for example: the ability to email from every device, share documents online, and access databases from almost anywhere, has only existed for 13 years (Spencer, 2019) so who can imagine where we will be 5-10 years from now? It is for this reason that cybersecurity is one of the most prevalent actors in the field of Science, Technology, and Society to date.
Up until about 1995 most cybersecurity attacks were targeting high level government computers, mostly for military purposes. This spurred the creation of the first firewall. Soon after, the first anti-virus software was developed to prevent viruses that were being spread over infected floppy diskes (Banga 2018). The software was remarkable due to its ability to seek out and mark data as “malicious”. These first cybersecurity advancements were effective in their time, but as mobile data usage increased hackers’ methods became more sophisticated. By 2008 nearly 500,000 new pieces of malware were being discovered monthly (Banga 2018). The traditional firewalls and antivirus protection became obsolete and inadequate so the next generation of defense systems were designed to improve security in a world reliant on mobile devices and the Cloud. While effective, it was clear after a 2013 Yahoo! incident that securing large networks is expensive and extremely difficult. A new approach was needed now that experts could not keep up with the problem. Endpoint