Hayden Schuster

Cybersecurity Is Our Largest Threat To National Security

Hayden Schuster
Cybersecurity Is Our Largest Threat To National Security

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The United States spends 10 times more money on National Defense than any other country, yet our Cybersecurity infrastructure and up-to-date security protocols are significantly lacking. As technology controls more and more of our lives, keeping our government entities, businesses, and citizens safe from Cyberattacks will become more and more important as we move towards a more secure future. It’s time we re-allocate our national defense budget accordingly.

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Take a look at our top eight 2021 National Defense priorities:

  • In the Air Domain ($56.9 billion)

  • In the Maritime Domain ($32.3 billion)

  • Nuclear Modernization ($28.9 billion)

  • Munitions ($21.3 billion) investments

  • Missile Defeat and Defense ($20.3 billion)

  • In the Space Domain ($18.0 billion)

  • In the Land Domain ($13.0 billion),

  • Cyberspace ($9.8 billion); and of that only 5.4 Billion is allocated towards CyberSecurity

Investing in Cybersecurity should be a top three, if not the number one concern for our Country. In fact, if we don’t spend an appropriate amount of money right now, we’ll have to pay dearly to recover from large hacks in the future. I don’t understand how this isn’t a bigger deal in the national conversation. As a good indicator, the global cybersecurity market was valued at USD 156.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.0% from 2020 to 2027. I hope the United States will take advantage of this industry and invest significantly more money than we are right now.

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Here are just two of the recent major hacks in the past few months:

  • SolarWinds: Just this year SolarWinds told the SEC that up to 18,000 of its customers installed updates that left them vulnerable to hackers. Since SolarWinds has many high-profile clients, including Fortune 500 companies and multiple agencies in the US government, the breach could be massive. US agencies — including parts of the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the Treasury — were attacked. So were private companies, like Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and Deloitte, and other organizations like the California Department of State Hospitals, and Kent State University, the Wall Street Journal reported. Likewise, since the hack was done so stealthily, and went undetected for months, security experts say that some victims may never know if they were hacked or not, the Wall Street Journal reported. At the Treasury Department, hackers broke into dozens of email accounts and networks in the Departmental Offices of the Treasury, "home to the department's highest-ranking officials," Sen. Ron Wyden said. The IRS hasn't found any evidence of being compromised, he added. But they don’t know…

  • Colonial Pipeline: Investigators at the largest fuel pipeline in the US are working to recover from a devastating cyber-attack that cut the flow of oil. The hack on Colonial Pipeline is being seen as one of the most significant attacks on critical national infrastructure in history. The pipeline transports nearly half of the east coast's fuel supplies and prices at pumps are expected to rise if the outage is long-lasting. The operator of the nation’s largest fuel pipeline confirmed it paid $4.4 million to a gang of hackers who broke into its computer systems.

Here are the five largest Cybersecurity threats we need to invest in fixing before they happen, according to Security Magazine:

  • Social engineering. In 2020, almost a third of the breaches incorporated social engineering techniques, of which 90% were phishing. Social engineering attacks include, but are not limited to, phishing emails, scareware, quid pro quo, and other techniques — all of which manipulate human psychology to attain specific goals. 

  • Ransomware. Ransomware is a data-encrypting program that demands payment to release the infected data. The overall sum of ransom demands will have reached $1.4 billion in 2020, with an average sum to rectify the damage reaching up to $1.45 million.  Ransomware is the third most popular type of malware used in data breaches and is employed in 22% of the cases. 

  • DDoS attacks. There were 4.83 million DDoS attacks attempted in the first half of 2020 alone and each hour of service disruption may have cost businesses as much as $100k on average.

  • Third-party software. The top 30 eCommerce retailers in the US have connected to 1,131 third-party resources each and 23% of those assets have at least one critical vulnerability. If one of the applications within this ecosystem is compromised, it opens the hackers a gateway to other domains. A breach caused by a third party costs $4.29 million on average. 

  • Cloud computing vulnerabilities. The global market for cloud computing is estimated to grow 17% this year, totaling $227.8 billion. While the pandemic lasts, the economy also witnessed a 50% increase in cloud use across all industries.

Conclusion:

We need to take action to fix this now; and unfortunately, an executive order for an additional $1 billion dollars to be allocated to Cybersecurity won’t be nearly enough to prioritize and get ahead of major current risks. It will take billions and billions of dollars more, which could be re-allocated from other National Defense priorities that shouldn’t have as much weight.