cybersecurity threats essay

Cyber Security Essay for Students and Children

Cyber security essay.

Cybersecurity means protecting data, networks, programs and other information from unauthorized or unattended access, destruction or change. In today’s world, cybersecurity is very important because of some security threats and cyber-attacks. For data protection, many companies develop software. This software protects the data. Cybersecurity is important because not only it helps to secure information but also our system from virus attack. After the U.S.A. and China, India has the highest number of internet users.

Cyber Threats

It can be further classified into 2 types. Cybercrime – against individuals, corporates, etc.and Cyberwarfare – against a state.

Cyber Crime

Use of cyberspace, i.e. computer, internet, cellphone, other technical devices, etc., to commit a crime by an individual or organized group is called cyber-crime. Cyber attackers use numerous software and codes in cyberspace to commit cybercrime. They exploit the weaknesses in the software and hardware design through the use of malware. Hacking is a common way of piercing the defenses of protected computer systems and interfering with their functioning. Identity theft is also common.

Cybercrimes may occur directly i.e,  targeting the computers directly by spreading computer viruses. Other forms include DoS attack. It is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. It suspends services of a host connected to the internet which may be temporary or permanent.

Malware is a software used to disrupt computer operation, gather sensitive information, or gain access to private computer systems. It usually appears in the form of code, scripts, active content, and other software. ‘Malware’ refers to a variety of forms of hostile or intrusive software, for example, Trojan Horses, rootkits, worms, adware, etc.

Another way of committing cybercrime is independent of the Computer Network or Device. It includes Economic frauds. It is done to destabilize the economy of a country, attack on banking security and transaction system, extract money through fraud, acquisition of credit/debit card data, financial theft, etc.

Hinder the operations of a website or service through data alteration, data destruction. Others include using obscene content to humiliate girls and harm their reputation, Spreading pornography, threatening e-mail, assuming a fake identity, virtual impersonation. Nowadays misuse of social media in creating intolerance, instigating communal violence and inciting riots is happening a lot.

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Cyber Warfare

Snowden revelations have shown that Cyberspace could become the theatre of warfare in the 21st century. Future wars will not be like traditional wars which are fought on land, water or air. when any state initiates the use of internet-based invisible force as an instrument of state policy to fight against another nation, it is called cyberwar’.

It includes hacking of vital information, important webpages, strategic controls, and intelligence. In December 2014 the cyberattack a six-month-long cyberattack on the German parliament for which the Sofacy Group is suspected. Another example 2008 cyberattack on US Military computers. Since these cyber-attacks, the issue of cyber warfare has assumed urgency in the global media.

Inexpensive Cybersecurity Measures

• The simplest thing you can do to up your security and rest easy at night knowing your data is safe is to change your passwords.
• You should use a password manager tool like LastPass, Dashlane, or Sticky Password to keep track of everything for you. These applications help you to use unique, secure passwords for every site you need while also keeping track of all of them for you.
• An easy way for an attacker to gain access to your network is to use old credentials that have fallen by the wayside. Hence delete unused accounts.
• Enabling two-factor authentication to add some extra security to your logins. An extra layer of security that makes it harder for an attacker to get into your accounts.
• Keep your Softwares up to date.

Today due to high internet penetration, cybersecurity is one of the biggest need of the world as cybersecurity threats are very dangerous to the country’s security. Not only the government but also the citizens should spread awareness among the people to always update your system and network security settings and to the use proper anti-virus so that your system and network security settings stay virus and malware-free.

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127 Cyber Security Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

With the increasing reliance on technology, cyber security has become a critical concern for individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide. As cyber threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, it is essential to stay informed about the latest trends and issues in this field. If you are tasked with writing an essay on cyber security, here are 127 topic ideas and examples to get your creative juices flowing.

The role of artificial intelligence in enhancing cyber security.

The impact of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.

The ethical considerations of cyber warfare.

The legal frameworks governing cyber security.

The challenges of securing the Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The role of encryption in protecting sensitive information.

The effectiveness of password policies in preventing cyber attacks.

The psychology behind social engineering attacks.

The impact of cyber attacks on the global economy.

The future of biometrics in cyber security.

The role of cyber insurance in mitigating cyber risks.

The ethics of hacking for the greater good.

The impact of cyber attacks on healthcare systems.

The role of education in raising cyber security awareness.

The challenges of securing cloud computing environments.

The implications of quantum computing on cyber security.

The importance of international cooperation in combating cyber crime.

The role of cyber security in protecting intellectual property.

The impact of cyber attacks on national security.

The challenges of securing critical data in the cloud.

The role of cybersecurity audits in identifying vulnerabilities.

The impact of cyber attacks on the banking and financial sector.

The ethical implications of government surveillance for cyber security purposes.

The role of cybersecurity professionals in addressing the skills gap.

The challenges of securing personal information in the digital age.

The impact of cyber attacks on elections and democratic processes.

The role of user awareness training in preventing cyber attacks.

The implications of data breaches for consumer trust.

The challenges of securing mobile devices in the workplace.

The role of cyber security in protecting personal privacy.

The impact of cyber attacks on small businesses.

The role of cyber security in safeguarding intellectual property in academia.

The challenges of securing critical infrastructure in developing countries.

The ethical considerations of vulnerability disclosure.

The impact of cyber attacks on the transportation sector.

The role of cyber security in protecting children online.

The challenges of securing Internet of Things (IoT) in smart homes.

The implications of cyber attacks on the aviation industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against ransomware attacks.

The impact of cyber attacks on the entertainment industry.

The challenges of securing e-commerce platforms.

The role of cyber security in preventing identity theft.

The implications of cyber attacks on the energy sector.

The ethical considerations of government backdoor access to encrypted data.

The impact of cyber attacks on the hospitality and tourism industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting sensitive government information.

The challenges of securing online gaming platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the media and journalism.

The role of cyber security in protecting against social media threats.

The impact of cyber attacks on the transportation and logistics industry.

The challenges of securing online banking and financial transactions.

The role of cyber security in protecting against insider threats.

The implications of cyber attacks on the education sector.

The ethical considerations of using cyber weapons in warfare.

The impact of cyber attacks on the retail industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against insider trading.

The challenges of securing online voting systems.

The implications of cyber attacks on the gaming industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against intellectual property theft.

The impact of cyber attacks on the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry.

The challenges of securing social media platforms.

The ethical considerations of cyber security in autonomous vehicles.

The implications of cyber attacks on the hospitality industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against credit card fraud.

The impact of cyber attacks on the manufacturing industry.

The challenges of securing online dating platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the insurance industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against corporate espionage.

The impact of cyber attacks on the food and beverage industry.

The challenges of securing online marketplaces.

The implications of cyber attacks on the pharmaceutical industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against intellectual property infringement.

The impact of cyber attacks on the nonprofit sector.

The challenges of securing online streaming platforms.

The ethical considerations of cyber security in wearable technology.

The implications of cyber attacks on the real estate industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against medical identity theft.

The impact of cyber attacks on the telecommunications industry.

The challenges of securing online job portals.

The implications of cyber attacks on the automotive industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against data breaches in the legal sector.

The impact of cyber attacks on the music industry.

The challenges of securing online auction platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the construction industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online harassment.

The impact of cyber attacks on the advertising and marketing industry.

The challenges of securing online learning platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the fashion industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online stalking.

The impact of cyber attacks on the sports industry.

The challenges of securing online travel booking platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the beauty and cosmetics industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online scams.

The impact of cyber attacks on the hospitality and catering industry.

The challenges of securing online dating applications.

The implications of cyber attacks on the healthcare and wellness industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online bullying.

The impact of cyber attacks on the entertainment and events industry.

The challenges of securing online food delivery platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the fitness and wellness industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online fraud.

The impact of cyber attacks on the home services industry.

The challenges of securing online social networking platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the pet care industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online piracy.

The impact of cyber attacks on the restaurant industry.

The challenges of securing online fashion retail platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the healthcare and fitness industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online hate speech.

The impact of cyber attacks on the wedding and event planning industry.

The challenges of securing online grocery delivery platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the gaming and entertainment industry.

The impact of cyber attacks on the music and entertainment industry.

The challenges of securing online travel and tourism platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the beauty and wellness industry.

The role of cyber security in protecting against online identity theft.

The impact of cyber attacks on the fashion and retail industry.

The challenges of securing online health and wellness platforms.

The implications of cyber attacks on the food and beverage industry.

These essay topic ideas cover a broad range of industries and sectors, highlighting the pervasive nature of cyber security threats. Whether you choose to explore the implications of cyber attacks on a specific industry, examine the challenges of securing a particular platform, or discuss the ethical considerations of cyber security, there are endless possibilities for research and analysis in this field. Remember to choose a topic that interests you and aligns with your objectives, ensuring a rewarding and engaging essay-writing experience.

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Cyber Security - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Cybersecurity, a critical concern in our digitally connected world, encompasses practices, technologies, and policies to protect networks, devices, programs, and data from attack or unauthorized access. Essays could delve into the myriad types of cyber threats like malware, phishing, and ransomware, exploring their evolution and impact on individuals and organizations. They might also discuss the measures individuals and enterprises can adopt to mitigate cyber risks, the challenges of staying ahead of cyber adversaries, and the role of governmental and international regulation in promoting cybersecurity. Discussions could extend to the implications of cybersecurity on national security, privacy, and the digital economy, and how the burgeoning field of cybersecurity is evolving to meet the complex challenges of the modern digital landscape. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Cyber Security you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

Cyber Security and how to Prevent Cyber Crime

Cybercrimes are interrupting normal computer functions and has brought many known companies and personal entities to their knees. Over the last decade, crime has entered into the world of information. Crime is developing gradually since the days when merchandise was transported by stagecoach, theft or extortion has changed to keep up, even to our modern-day equivalent-credit and debit cards. Stealing credit card number has become well known danger. In the present, internet has become a playing field for computer attackers. […]

Cyber Security Threats in Healthcare

Cyberattacks have been targeting the healthcare industry, among the biggest industries in the US, in the 2018 period. The implication is that it has come time to improve the protection of institutional and patient information with a more tailored approach to this threat. In comparison with other industries, many health organizations have engaged in inadequate investment in cybersecurity while spending approximately as much money as other industries. It is quite worrying when phishing cyberattacks, as well as breaches of patient […]

Impact of Technology on Privacy

The 21st Century is characterized by the heavy impact technology has on us as a society while it continues to develop new devices and modernize technology. Millions of individuals around the world are now connected digitally, in other words, people globally rely heavily on smartphones tablets, and/ or computers that store or save a majority of their personal information. Critical and extremely personal data is available and collected in these smart technology such as credit card details, fingerprint layout, and […]

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Cyber Security Threats on the State Level

This paper examines two notable events of cyber warfare and security in our current age (the Stuxnet attack on centrifuges, and the Petya ransomware affecting citizens and governmental agencies), as well as examines how these attacks shape foreign and domestic policies and procedures. By examining the extent of the damage of these two attacks, I will argue that cyber warfare events will not just affect governmental systems, but would ultimately cause destruction to the layman's infrastructure, further crippling any state […]

Essay of Cyber Security Education

The experts and professionals of matters related to cyber security should assign the participant puzzles whereby they should divide themselves into various teams as indicated in the framework of NICE, and each group should specialize in a specific area. There is a wide range of ideas on the cyber security where the riddles may come from the fields like Wireshark, protection of website application, analysis of digital systems, and social engineering. There should be a task force created to conduct […]

Constant the Rise of Technologies and Cyber Threats

There is a wide range of cyber threats that happen every day, it is important that we follow all of the necessary precaution's in order to ensure the safety of our private information including but not limited to passwords, network credentials, banking or credit card information. Malicious attacks occur more frequently than one would expect, their purpose is to damage a device. Most of us are unaware of the weaknesses we have within our smartphone's security settings. With that being […]

Cyber Security for the Average American

According to statistics, the average American spends 10 hours per day using technology. Whether it be a cellphone, tablet or laptop, that's more than 40 hours a week online. We think that we're safe, but part of living in this 21st century is understanding that our so-called private information can easily accessed by the wrong person and made public. I am sure you have heard, at some point, news pertaining to identity theft or data breaches, with the effects being […]

Cyber Security for our Generation

Some of the biggest threats to our national security often go unnoticed. These threats are generally not publicized, and no emphasis is placed on them. They represent some of the most significant challenges our generation faces. It's shocking is that these threats are often covered up or are attempted to be. For instance, one of the key issues that arose in 2018 was the Facebook data scandal. This scandal was not a cyber-attack per se, yet it highlighted that most […]

How Pervasive is the Internet in your Life?

Q.1 How pervasive is the internet in your life? How much do you think society has come to depend on the Internet? Answer: When it comes to how pervasive the internet is in current life, my answer is that the internet has almost influenced each event of our daily life every day. Of course, we can't deny that there may be some people, around our side, who never heard about the internet, for example, those elder people who has less […]

The E-Commerce and Cyber Security

The wish is the online e-commerce company that will provide the opportunity for all shoppers to find their favourite wordrobe online in all of the world. Their wardrobe could be included dresses, skirts, jeans and etc.... This company was founded in 2010 and also have the App for their over 100 million users on the iOS and android platform. The E-Commerce servers for this company is located in four cites internationally, two are in the USA, the headquarter in Alexandria […]

Advanced Cyber Security and its Methodologies

Digital Civilization has turned into a critical wellspring of data sharing and proficient exercises like business, saving money exchanges, shopping, and administrations and With the expansion in utilization of the internet, cybercriminal exercises are additionally expanding exponentially. The fundamental reasons is that with the commencement of internet, the web applications were likewise getting prevalence for information putting away and information sharing, regardless of the client. With the progression of time, web applications were getting more intricate with quick increment in […]

Defining Cybersecurity Law

INTRODUCTION In "Defining Cybersecurity Law," Jeff Kosseff, the author, appears to be more concerned with improving cybersecurity law than defining it. In this paper, I will provide a brief summary and critique of the four substantive sections of this article. I will conclude with a mention of the aspects of cybersecurity law the author missed. My main issues with this article are the author's (1) preoccupation with the prevention of cybersecurity breaches instead of balancing security against values, (2) definition […]

Why do you Want to Study Cyber Security

In today's hyper-connected era, we're more online than offline. Our digital identities intertwine with the real, making the boundary blurry. But as we gleefully navigate this digital frontier, shadows lurk in the form of cyber threats, reminding us that our brave new world isn't without its pitfalls. So, why venture into the challenging world of cybersecurity? Why choose a path that constantly grapples with these shadows? Spoiler alert: It's more than just a career choice. Real-world Superheroes In comic books […]

Health Care Cyber Security

Healthcare is an industry sector that has become unstable and crucial in this expanding digital landscape. This necessitates an organization's data security program to be properly structured, as there is no room for error, which could easily translate into a life-and-death situation. This article presents both fundamental technical and business issues that often elude the healthcare data security program. On the technical side, extensive proliferation of data and systems into the cloud, a continuous increase in connected medical devices, and […]

Substations: Smart Grid & Cyber Security Threats

Transferring from old energy network to a new technology such as smart grids. It changes the energy industry worldwide to better quality, manageability and performance. It gives us the ability to operate it by communications, monitor and control it. However, using communications in smart grid increase connectivity causing our security to be exposed and make it more challenge to protected. It can be a target for hackers, and cyber terrorism. Thus, it got governments, consumer and industry attention to increase […]

Cybersecurity: Protecting the Fragile Web of Global Connectivity

I believe everything that is created by man can also be destroyed by it. Humans have proved to be the most intelligent species in this world. We have created the technology that appears to be smarter than the human brain but if it overpowers the human intelligence it can be destroyed as well. Internet works in the same manner. It has created dependencies that have led to millions of people relying on this technology in getting every task done no […]

Cybersecurity Issues in Societal Perspective

E-governance and Cybersecurity Documents issued by a country's government provide a personal identity to an individual. Driver's licenses, social security numbers, tax identification numbers, and various other entitlement documents are used on a regular basis by people to demonstrate their identity and authorization for various opportunities. Because these documents form the basis for all subsequent documents, their integrity is of high importance to stakeholders. Therefore, these crucial documents are targets for criminals and further cyberattacks (Conklin, A., & White, G. […]

The Real Issue Behind Cyber-Security

The steady trend towards digitalization has been occurring for a long time, and as of lately, a new type of crime market has risen alongside digitalization. In recent years, companies all over the world have been affected by some form of cybersecurity issue whether that be attacks to infrastructure or momentary paralyzation of the company itself through the exploitation of security measures. Over the years the number of attacks all around the world has increased exponentially with many more cyber-attacks […]

Cybersecurity Today

Networks (internet) are not secure enough due to the lack of efficient cybersecurity. As a result, ransomware attacks are increasing, affecting most businesses and individuals today. Enacting measures to detect cyberattacks and ransomware attacks can be helpful in preventing unforeseen repercussions from the attacker in the corporate network. Cybersecurity needs to implement new policies and recommendations so that ransomware attacks can be reduced. This report will first discuss some ransomware attacks that have happened before. Next, the report will discuss […]

Cybersecurity as a Form of Digital Protection

Cybersecurity is an ever-growing form of digital protection, created and used for the sole purpose of protecting confidential information against hard drive malfunctions, power outages, and adversaries. In healthcare, it is crucial for hospitals and health providers to keep up with the security of digital health data through cybersecurity in order to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and avoid potentially devastating consequences. Insider threats, access control breaches, and network breaches are some of the main […]

Virtual Reality: Game Transfer Phenomena

Imagine if you were you were floating through space, watching a horror film,s or perhaps playing a video game, and it seemed like you were actually there. With the invention of virtual reality (VR), people are able to explore the illusion of this reality. Virtual reality is computer-generated technology used to create a manufactured environment. There is a range of systems that are used for this purpose such as special headsets and fiber optic gloves. The term virtual reality means […]

Cybersecurity Paper

With cybersecurity attacks on the rise, the ability of an organization to ensure uninterrupted operations is an imperative. No longer can an organization solely rely upon software applications to identify and mitigate cyber risks. It takes a skilled team led by an experienced manager to holistically address an organization's technology risks. The National Infrastructure Advisory Council's (NIAC's) definition of infrastructure resilience is "the ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events. The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure or […]

Cybercrimes: an Unprecedented Threat to the Society

What is a Cybercrime? Cybercrime, or computer-oriented crime, is the crime that involves computer and its network. The computer may have been used in the commission of a crime, or it may be the target. Cybercrimes can be defined as: "Offences that are committed against individuals or groups of individuals with a criminal motive to intentionally harm the reputation of the victim or cause physical or mental harm, or loss, to the victim directly or indirectly, using modern telecommunication networks […]

Cybersecurity for a Successful Acquisition Report

The act of conducting a policy gap analysis is crucial in determining any missing overlap or technical deficiencies when planning to join the IT architecture and network topologies of two or more companies. During the acquisition process, the policies of either party will be examined in order to confirm current software updates and patches, proper configuration of tools, and employee protocol during the transition. Once the initial merger is complete, it'll be important to compare the outcome with each company's […]

Reasons of Cyber Attacks

1. Substandard User ID and Password Every individual need to have their own password secure and stronger. For an instance strong password can be obtained by latest maintaining minimum of having15-character length with an least one special character, number, capital and small alphabet. Most importantly choosing password like own name, date of birth, phone number may become hacker to simply figure out easy to break through your personal account security. In the same way User ID should not be shared […]

Laws of Cybercrimes

Abstract This paper examines the cyber security and its challenges in current temperamental circumstance of security in present world. These day's innovation of technology persistently developing more quickly than expected. As a public that runs on latest innovation technologies, we are likewise therefore reliant on it. Where similarly as innovation of technology brings ever more noteworthy advantages, it likewise brings ever more prominent threats. We should look some significant concerns confronting that incorporate threats, information theft, identity theft, cyber war, […]

Developing and Testing Photorealistic Avatar with Body Motions and Facial Expressions for Communication in Social Virtual Reality Applications

Developing and Testing Photorealistic Avatar with Body Motions and Facial Expressions for Communication in Social Virtual Reality Applications Abstract Providing effective communication in social virtual reality (VR) applications requires a high level of avatar representation realism and body movement to convey users’ thoughts and behaviours. In this research, we investigate the influence of avatar representation and behaviour on communication in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) by comparing video-based versus model-based avatar representations. Additionally, we introduce a novel VR communication system […]

Advantages of Cybersecurity in a Digital World

Ever stopped to think about how much of your life plays out in the digital realm? Our lives are undeniably intertwined with technology, from morning alarms on our smartphones to evening Netflix binges. Yet, while we eagerly embrace the latest app or gadget, there's an unsung hero behind the scenes, ensuring our digital escapades are safe and sound: cybersecurity. It's easy to dismiss it as mere technical jargon or something only businesses need to worry about. But, truth be told, […]

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How To Write an Essay About Cyber Security

Understanding cyber security.

Before writing an essay about cyber security, it is essential to understand what it encompasses. Cyber security refers to the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks. These cyber attacks are usually aimed at accessing, changing, or destroying sensitive information; extorting money from users; or interrupting normal business processes. Begin your essay by defining cyber security and discussing its importance in the contemporary digital world. Explore the different types of cyber threats, such as malware, phishing, ransomware, and denial-of-service attacks. It’s also crucial to understand the impact of these threats on individuals, businesses, and governments.

Developing a Thesis Statement

A strong essay on cyber security should be anchored by a clear, focused thesis statement. This statement should present a specific viewpoint or argument about cyber security. For instance, you might discuss the evolving nature of cyber threats, the challenges of cyber security in a particular sector (like finance or healthcare), or analyze the effectiveness of current cyber security measures. Your thesis will guide the direction of your essay and provide a structured approach to your analysis.

Gathering Supporting Evidence

To support your thesis, gather evidence from credible sources. This might include recent studies on cyber security, statistics about cyber attacks, examples of significant security breaches, or expert opinions. Use this evidence to support your thesis and build a persuasive argument. Remember to consider different perspectives, including technological, ethical, and legal viewpoints.

Analyzing Cyber Security Strategies and Challenges

Dedicate a section of your essay to analyzing cyber security strategies and the challenges faced in implementing them. Discuss various approaches to cyber security, such as technological solutions, policy measures, and user education. Explore the challenges in keeping up with constantly evolving cyber threats and the balance between security and privacy. For example, consider how advancements in areas like artificial intelligence and machine learning are influencing cyber security practices.

Concluding the Essay

Conclude your essay by summarizing the main points of your discussion and restating your thesis in light of the evidence provided. Your conclusion should tie together your analysis and emphasize the significance of cyber security in the digital age. You might also want to reflect on future trends in cyber security or suggest areas where further research or policy development is needed.

Reviewing and Refining Your Essay

After completing your essay, review and edit it for clarity and coherence. Ensure that your arguments are well-structured and supported by evidence. Check for grammatical accuracy and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider seeking feedback from peers or experts in the field to refine your essay further. A well-written essay on cyber security will not only demonstrate your understanding of the topic but also your ability to engage with complex technological and societal issues.

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Essay on Cyber Security

Students are often asked to write an essay on Cyber Security in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Cyber Security

Understanding cyber security.

Cyber security is about protecting computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, and data from digital attacks. It’s a critical area as our daily life, economic vitality, and national security rely on a stable, safe, and resilient cyberspace.

The Importance of Cyber Security

Cyber security is important because it helps protect sensitive information, like our personal data and banking details, from being stolen by hackers. It also safeguards against harmful viruses that can damage our devices.

Types of Cyber Threats

Common threats include malware, phishing, and ransomware. Malware is harmful software, phishing tricks people into revealing sensitive information, and ransomware locks users out until they pay a ransom.

Cyber Security Practices

Good practices include using strong passwords, regularly updating software, and not clicking on suspicious links. These can help protect us from cyber threats.

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250 Words Essay on Cyber Security

Introduction to cyber security.

Cybersecurity, a term that has gained paramount importance in the digital age, refers to the practice of protecting internet-connected systems, including hardware, software, and data, from digital attacks. Its significance is amplified by the increasing reliance on technology, which, while offering numerous benefits, also opens up new avenues for potential threats.

The digital landscape is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it facilitates communication, commerce, and innovation. On the other, it provides a fertile ground for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity thus becomes crucial in safeguarding sensitive information, preventing unauthorized access, and maintaining system integrity.

Challenges in Cyber Security

However, the complexity and sophistication of cyber threats are growing at an alarming pace. Cybercriminals are using advanced techniques, such as AI and machine learning, to bypass traditional security measures. This necessitates the development of more robust, adaptive cybersecurity strategies.

The Future of Cyber Security

The future of cybersecurity lies in proactive defense mechanisms. By leveraging technologies like AI, predictive analytics, and blockchain, we can anticipate and neutralize threats before they cause harm. Furthermore, fostering a culture of cybersecurity awareness is equally important to empower individuals and organizations against cyber threats.

In conclusion, cybersecurity is a vital aspect of our digital existence. Its importance, challenges, and future prospects underline the need for continuous research, development, and education in this field. As the digital landscape evolves, so too must our approach to cybersecurity.

500 Words Essay on Cyber Security

Cyber security, also known as information technology security, focuses on protecting computers, networks, programs, and data from unintended or unauthorized access, damage, or destruction. In the digital era, the importance of cyber security is growing exponentially due to the increasing reliance on computer systems, the internet, and wireless network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and due to the growth of smart devices like smartphones and televisions.

The significance of robust cyber security measures cannot be understated. Cyber attacks can lead to serious consequences like identity theft, extortion attempts, deletion of important data, and even the disruption of normal business operations. In more extreme cases, they can lead to the compromise of national security. Hence, cyber security is not just a concern for businesses or governments, but it is a potential threat to all internet users.

Cyber threats can be broadly divided into three categories: Cybercrime includes single actors or groups targeting systems for financial gain or to cause disruption; Cyber-attack often involves politically motivated information gathering; and Cyberterrorism is intended to undermine electronic systems to cause panic or fear. Examples of these threats are malware, phishing, ransomware, and social engineering.

Cyber Security Measures

In response to these threats, several cyber security measures are being employed. These include firewalls, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus software, and encryption. Furthermore, organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of information assurance, where data integrity, confidentiality, and availability are assured.

As technology evolves, so does the complexity and sophistication of cyber threats. Hence, the future of cyber security lies in constant evolution and adaptation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are becoming integral in combating cyber threats. These technologies can learn and adapt to new threats, making them more efficient than traditional security measures.

In conclusion, cyber security is a crucial aspect of our digital lives, and its importance will only increase with time. To ensure a secure digital environment, individuals, organizations, and governments must understand the potential threats and employ robust security measures to counter them. The future of cyber security is promising, with the advent of AI and ML, but the road ahead is challenging, requiring constant vigilance and adaptation to new threats.

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Article Contents

Exposure to cyberattacks and policy attitudes, the mediating role of threat perceptions, experimental method.

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Cyberattacks, cyber threats, and attitudes toward cybersecurity policies

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Keren L G Snider, Ryan Shandler, Shay Zandani, Daphna Canetti, Cyberattacks, cyber threats, and attitudes toward cybersecurity policies, Journal of Cybersecurity , Volume 7, Issue 1, 2021, tyab019, https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyab019

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Does exposure to cyberattacks influence public support for intrusive cybersecurity policies? How do perceptions of cyber threats mediate this relationship? While past research has demonstrated how exposure to cyberattacks affects political attitudes, the mediating role played by threat perception has been overlooked. This study employs a controlled randomized survey experiment design to test the effect of exposure to lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks on support for different types of cybersecurity policies. One thousand twenty-two Israeli participants are exposed to scripted and simulated television reports of lethal or nonlethal cyberattacks against national infrastructure. Findings suggest that exposure to cyberattacks leads to greater support for stringent cybersecurity regulations, through a mechanism of threat perception. Results also indicate that different types of exposure relate to heightened support for different types of regulatory policies. People exposed to lethal cyberattacks tend to support cybersecurity policies that compel the government to alert citizens about cyberattacks. People who were exposed to nonlethal attacks, on the other hand, tend to support oversight policies at higher levels. More broadly, our research suggests that peoples’ willingness to accept government cybersecurity policies that limit personal civil liberties and privacy depends on the type of cyberattacks to which they were exposed and the perceptions associated with such exposure.

In recent years, the increase in civilian exposure to cyberattacks has been accompanied by heightened demands for governments to introduce comprehensive cybersecurity policies. These demands peaked in the aftermath of the 2021 Colonial Pipeline and SolarWinds cyberattacks, where the US government's lack of access to cybersecurity information in critical industries wrought havoc on the country's national and economic security. In the aftermath of these attacks, lawmakers and the public exhibited newfound enthusiasm for legislation that would mandate cyberattack reporting by private enterprises—accelerating a regulatory trend that has existed for several years [ 1 ]. In 2020, for example, 40 US states and territories introduced more than 280 cybersecurity related bills and resolutions [ 2 , 3 ]. A similar process has taken place in Europe [ 4 ] and in Israel [ 5 , 6 ].

The public willingness to accept government policies and regulations that limit personal civil liberties and privacy is part of a delicate tradeoff between security and privacy. In some ways, privacy is seen as an adequate cost of enhanced personal and societal security in the face of novel threats. However, the public has grown increasingly sensitive to the importance of online privacy, and is keenly aware of the ethical, political, legal, and rights-based dilemmas that revolve around government monitoring of online activity and communications [ 7 , 8 ].

The debate on digital surveillance centers on how and whether authorities should gain access to encrypted materials, and raise key questions concerning the extent of state interference in civic life, and the protection of civil rights in the context of security. Yet what lies at the heart of this willingness to accept government policies and regulations that limit personal civil liberties and privacy via increasing public demand for government intervention in cybersecurity? Does exposure to different types of cyberattacks lead to heightened support for different types of regulatory policies? And does the public differentiate between interventionist and regulatory forms of cybersecurity policies?

To test these questions, we ran a controlled randomized survey experiment that exposed 1022 Israeli participants to simulated video news reports of lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks. We argue that public support for governmental cybersecurity measures rises as a result of exposure to different forms of cyberattacks, and that perceived threat plays a mediating role in this relationship. More specifically, we propose that exposure to initial media reports about cyberattacks is a key to the exposure effect, since at this time the threat is magnified and the public has minimal information about the identity of the attacker and the type of cyberattack that was conducted. Past events show that in many cases, the public internalizes the details of an attack in its immediate aftermath when media reports are heaviest. While later reports in the days and weeks following an attack will include far more detailed information, the damage by this time has already been done and the public is already scared and alert.

Further to this, we suggest that the literature has erroneously pooled together all cyber regulatory policies under a single banner of cybersecurity. We propose that civilian exposure to different types of cyberattacks leads to increased support for different and specific cybersecurity policies. We therefore differentiate between support for policies that focus on alerting the public in cases of cyberattacks and others that call for oversight of cybersecurity. In examining how exposure to cyberattacks influences support for these specific policy positions, we distinguish between the outcome of cyberattacks—lethal attacks that cause lethal consequences as a first- or second-degree outcome of the attack, versus nonlethal attacks that merely involve financial consequences. This more nuanced breakdown of exposure types and policy options can help officials contend with certain policy debates without the need for a one-size-fits-all policy. For example, reservations expressed by conservative/libertarian scholars who are concerned about government intervention in the commercial marketplace need not disqualify all forms of cybersecurity policy [ 9 ]. Likewise, the reservations of those concerned with individual privacy violations need not lead to the denunciation of all policies [ 10 ].

To ground this analysis of how the public responds following exposure to both lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks, we apply theories associated with the literature on terrorism and political violence. These theories offer sophisticated mechanisms that explain how individual exposure to violence translates into political outcomes—including demands for government intervention and policymaking. This approach is especially applicable in the digital realm as cyberattacks track a middle ground between technological breakthroughs that constitute tactical developments and new strategic weapons [ 11 ]. The consequence of such ambiguity is that civilians who are exposed to digital political threats can only identify the outcomes of the attack—i.e. whether it is a lethal or nonlethal cyberattack—while the motivations and identities of attackers often remain veiled, or at least unsettled. In light of these attributional challenges, and reflecting the fact that the public typically operates in a low-information environment, we refrain from declaring that the cyberattacks that appear in our experimental manipulations are cybercrime, cyberterrorism, cyber-vandalism, or any other type of attack. Rather, we refer to all attacks under the general heading of "cyberattacks," leaving all respondents to react to the attacks in a way that they see as appropriate in light of the severity of the reported outcome.

The most common form of cyberattack is cybercrime. Reports of data breaches resulting from cyberattacks by criminal organizations show a growth of more than threefold between 2011 and 2018 [ 12 ]. In the first half of 2019 alone, the United States Treasury Department announced that there had been 3494 successful cyberattacks against financial institutions resulting in colossal financial losses and the capture of personal information relating to hundreds of millions of people [ 13 ]. Cyberattacks executed by terror organizations are a newer phenomenon, albeit one that has captured the popular imagination. While terror organizations predominantly make use of cyberspace for fundraising, propaganda, and recruitment [ 14 , 15 ], a recent development has been the next-generation capacity of cyber strikes to trigger lethal consequences, be it through first- or second-order effects. 1 We acknowledge that scholars have expressed some skepticism about the likelihood of impending destructive cyberterror incidents [ 16–18 ], yet national security officials have regularly predicted that lethal cyberattacks pose a "critical threat" [ 19 ]. In the last decade, the nature of this threat has evolved from the earlier depictions of an apocalyptic cyber "pearl harbor" that would ravage modern society from the shadows [ 20 ], to a more nuanced understanding that cyberattacks, while still posing a threat to critical infrastructure, are more likely to manifest through targeted strikes. For example, in April 2020, Israel narrowly averted a cyberattack targeting civilian water networks that would have killed scores of civilians by adding chlorine to the water supply [ 19 ]. Other physically destructive cyberattacks have caused explosive damage to critical infrastructure [ 21 ], while researchers have experimentally verified the ability of malicious digital actors to hack pacemakers and insulin pumps [ 22 ]. While the lethal stature of cyberattacks is still developing, these incidents establish the bona fides of this impending threat and the importance of understanding how the public responds to this type of event.

The discussion that follows has four parts. We begin by examining the theory of how exposure to violence translates into policy preferences, with a particular focus on the mediating role of threat perception. Second, we discuss the design of our controlled, randomized experiment that exposes participants to television news reports of lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks. Third, we present our main results and consider various mediation models that pertain to the different regulatory subsets. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the study of cybersecurity and cyber threats more generally.

Civilians who are exposed to political violence often suffer from feelings of trauma, anxiety, and helplessness in the face of threatening external forces [ 23–25 ]. These emotional responses—whether caused by acts of cyber or conventional violence—are known to cause shifts in political attitudes. Research has shown how exposure to conventional terrorism, which targets civilians and disrupts their daily routines, has an impact on individuals’ support for attitudes toward peace and compromise with the other [ 26 ], political conservatism [ 27 ], exclusionism [ 28 ] and intragroup relations [ 29 ].

Despite the sizeable literature dealing with the effects of exposure to violence, few studies directly investigate the effects of exposure to destructive cyberattacks. This is despite the growing recognition that these threats have become a very tangible part of modern life. In a complex scenario described in the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, the authors contemplated how new forms of cyberattacks could be used to “acquire the credentials necessary to access the industrial control system of a nuclear power plant… with the intent of threatening to conduct cyber operations against the system in a manner that will cause significant damage or death…” [ 30 ]. Even more recently, reports have acknowledged how cyberterror attacks could immobilize a country's or region's electrical infrastructure [ 31 ], disable military defense systems [ 32 ], and even imperil nuclear stability [ 33 ]. While there is a difference between capability and intent, and we acknowledge that physically destructive cyber threats have remained scarce until now, understanding how civilians respond to such digital cyberattacks will become particularly important as the threat matures.

Studies that directly investigated exposure to digital political violence found that exposure had significant effects on political behavior and attitudes, akin to exposure to conventional political violence [ 34 , 35 ]. In a series of exploratory studies regarding the phenomena of cyberterrorism, Gross et al . [ 34 , 36 ] sought to empirically measure the effects of exposure to cyberterrorism under controlled experimental conditions. Their key finding was that exposure to cyberterrorism was severe enough to generate significant negative emotions and cognitive reactions (threat perceptions) at equivalent levels to those of conventional terror acts. Canetti et al . [ 37 ] found that victims of cyberattacks react by demanding government protection, with psychological distress explaining the relationship between exposure and the demand for government intervention. In a subsequent biologically focused experiment, Canetti et al . measured cortisol levels to show how participants who are exposed to cyberterror attacks and experience higher levels of stress are more likely to support hardline retaliatory policies [ 38 ].

Building on this foundation, other research has sought to refine a more precise psycho-political mechanism that understands how cyberattacks trigger shifts in political attitudes. Research by Shandler et al . [ 39 , 40 ], e.g. found that only lethal cyberattacks cause political consequences akin to conventional political violence, and that only the emotion of anger explained these shifts.

In the current paper, we aim to add to this emerging body of research by examining the topic of cybersecurity preferences in the aftermath of lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks. While one past study by Cheung-Blunden et al . [ 41 ] examined how emotional responses to cyber incidents sway cybersecurity preferences, no research has yet attempted to analyze how different types of cyberattacks affect different kinds of cybersecurity policies. As such, we add much needed nuance to the literature.

For the purpose of considering the effects of exposure to cyberattacks, this research focuses on the "outcome" of a cyberattack rather than the "identity" of the perpetrator or the "classification" of the attack. This is necessary for several reasons that relate to the specific characteristics of cyberspace. First, as introduced above, a new class of cyberattack exemplified by the ransomware epidemic has exhibited characteristics of both cybercrime and cyberterror operations, impeding the classification of cyber incidents into simple categories. Second, attribution in cyberspace is fraught with difficulty, and an age of manipulated information complicates the determination of provenance [ 42–44 ]. Sophisticated cyber operatives working from anywhere in the world can exploit the principle of anonymity that underlies the Internet infrastructure to hide their identity. Though authorities would be able to quickly identify the identity of an attacker behind any major cyberattack [ 42 ], this is essentially impossible for members of the public who are confronted with both structural and technical obstacles that prevent them from rendering an objective judgement about the attack source. This reality of publicly obscured cyber antagonists can be viewed in the timelines of several famous cyber incidents. It took between six months and three years for authorities and private actors to publicly reveal the actors behind the 2017 WannaCry attacks, the 2016 cyber intrusion into the Democratic National Committee's networks, and the 2016 cyberattack against the Bowman Dam in New York [ 45–47 ]. While each of these incidents were eventually attributed to an attack source, and the authorities may well have known the identity of the attacker from an early date, we can see that from the perspective of the public, there was a time lag of several months or years before a name was attached to any attack. Third, state involvement in cyberattacks—either as a direct attacker or via proxies—can add substantial background noise to the perception of an attack, raising the specter of interstate war. There is an interesting debate in the literature about whether states may be deemed capable of conducting cyberterrorism—or whether this is a label that can only be applied to nonstate actors. While the literature is still unsettled on this point, Macdonald, Jarvis and Nouri [ 48 ] found considerable expert support for the proposition that states can engage in cyberterrorism.

It is for these reasons that we choose to follow the lead of the scholars who are beginning to evaluate responses to cyber threats through the prism that is most readily available for the public—specifically, the outcome variable, or in other words, the lethality of the attack [ 33 ]. This focus on outcome rather than attacker is necessary in order to understand the factors that prompt emotional and political responses in the public. While these information asymmetries explain our focus on the outcome of the attack rather than the identity of the attacker, we acknowledge that the people draw inferences about the identity and motivations of attackers based on prior experiences and political orientation [ 49 ]. Liberman and Skitka's vicarious retribution theory [ 50 , 51 ] demonstrates how the public may impute responsibility to unrelated or symbolically related offenders when the identity of an attacker is unclear. Nonetheless, maintaining the highest standards of ecological validity demands that attribution and attack categorization is absent in initial public reports of cyber incidents.

Under this framework, we hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 1: Exposure to (i) lethal or (ii) nonlethal cyberattacks will lead to greater support for adopting cybersecurity policies compared with people who were not exposed to any cyberattack. In other words, exposure to cyberattacks—lethal (LC) or nonlethal (NLC)—will increase support for adopting cybersecurity policies, as compared with a control group.

Hypothesis 2: People who are exposed to lethal cyberattacks (LC) will exhibit to higher support for adopting cybersecurity policies than people who are exposed to nonlethal cyberattacks (NLC).

Civilians are notoriously weak at accurately assessing security threats—a fact that is amplified in the cyber realm due to low cybersecurity knowledge, general cognitive biases in calculating risk, and the distortion of cyber risks by the media, which focuses predominantly on spectacular yet low-likelihood attacks [ 52–54 ]. Perceived risk is partly reliant on the scope of the attack to which people are exposed. Victims of cybercrimes (identity theft and cyber bullying) report moderate or severe emotional distress such as anger, fear, anxiety, mistrust, and loss of confidence [ 55 ]. The effects of conventional terrorism include post-traumatic stress, depression, and anticipatory anxiety [ 56 , 29 ]. In both of these cases, threat perception is a common predictor of political attitudes and behavior. Indeed, the best predictor of hostile out-group attitudes is the perceived threat that out-group members will harm members of the in-group, whether physically, economically or symbolically [ 28 , 57 , 58 ]. In many of the studies cited above, threat perception was found to mediate the relationship between exposure to violence and support for harsh or restrictive policies, especially in conflict-related contexts [ 27 ]. Extending this empirical and theoretical evidence to digital political violence suggests that individuals are likely to respond similarly to cyber threats by supporting strong cybersecurity policies through the interceding influence of heightened threat perception.

A set of early studies compared the level of threat evoked by exposure to different forms of cyber threats, identifying key differences in the how cybercrime and cyberterrorism influenced attitudes toward government policy [ 34 , 36 ]. These studies concluded that direct exposure to cyberterrorism had no effect on support for hardline cybersecurity policies (increased digital surveillance, the introduction of intrusive new regulations), but threat perceptions relating to cyberterrorism successfully predicted support for these policies. Recognizing therefore that threat perception plays a central role in understanding the response to cyberattacks, we predict that

Hypothesis 3: Cyber threat perception will mediate the relationship between individual exposure to cyberattacks and support for cybersecurity policies.

To test our hypotheses, we conducted a controlled survey experiment that exposed respondents to simulated news reports about major cyberattacks. The experimental manipulation relied on professionally produced original video clips that broadcast feature news reports. The lethal treatment group viewed a feature report discussing several lethal cyberattacks that had taken place against Israeli targets, while the nonlethal treatment group broadcast a collection of stories pertaining to nonlethal cyber incidents (see below for additional details about each manipulation). The control group did not watch any news report.

We utilized the medium of video news reports for our experimental manipulation since experiments in recent years have shown how broadcast videos and media reports of major attacks arouse strong emotions among viewers, which in turn trigger reevaluations of policy positions and political attitudes related to issues of security [ 35 , 59 , 60 ]. The rationale behind these finding can be partly explained by Terror Management Theory, which explains how even indirect exposure to violent acts triggers potent emotional reactions as people confront threats to their mortality [ 61 , 62 ]. Just as importantly, news reports are a key avenue by which the public learns about major security incidents, and so this method maintains its ecological validity. Each of the groups completed a pre- and post-survey, answering a series of questions about their attitudes to cybersecurity along with relevant sociodemographic information.

Each of the television news reports was presented as an authentic feature story that appeared on Israeli channel 1 television station. The news reports described the global scale of cyber threats facing the public (i.e. two million malicious web sites launch each month and 60 000 new malware programs appear every day at an annual cost to the global economy of 500 billion dollars). The clips were screened in a feature format using on-camera interviews, voiceover and film footage to describe various cyberattacks. To increase the authenticity of the experience, the reports included interviews with well-known Israeli security experts. To mimic the challenges of cyber attribution, the perpetrators of the attacks described in the videos were not identified and were neutrally referred to as cyber operatives. Each video lasted approximately 3 min.

Lethal Cyber Condition—The television news report described various cyberattacks with lethal consequences that had targeted Israel during the previous years. For example, in one of the featured stories, an attack was revealed to have targeted the servers controlling Israel's electric power grid, cutting off electricity to a hospital and causing deaths. In another story, cyber operatives were said to have attacked a military navigation system, altering the course of a missile so that it killed three Israeli soldiers. A third story concerned the use of malware to infect the pacemaker of the Israeli Defense Minister, and a fourth involved the failure of an emergency call to 10 000 military reserve soldiers due to a cyberattack in which foreign agents changed the last digit of the soldiers’ telephone numbers in the military database. The video's interviews with well-known figures from Israel's security sector emphasized the life-threatening danger posed by cyberattacks.

Nonlethal Cyber Condition—The television news report revealed various nonlethal cyberattacks that had targeted Israel during recent years. For example, the broadcast explained how mobile phone users are made vulnerable to attackers by installing new games and applications, potentially introducing malware that can later access data like personal messages or financial details. Another example concerned the dangers posed by the Internet of Things and featured a story in which all the major credit cards companies suspended their customer support after hundreds of thousands of citizens were fraudulently charged for food purchases by their smart refrigerators. The Israeli experts in this video emphasized the potential financial damage from cyberattacks.

Participants

The online survey experiment was administered in Israel during September 2015 via the Midgam Survey Panel. One thousand twenty-two participants were randomly assigned to the three groups (lethal condition: N  = 387; nonlethal condition: N  = 374; control group: N  = 361). The experimental sample represents a random cross-section of the Jewish Israeli population. The sample is largely representative of the wider population, and balance checks reveal that the treatment distribution is acceptable. We note that due to data collection constraints, the sample does not include ultra-orthodox (religious) respondents due to difficulties in accessing this subgroup through online methods. The mean age of the participants was 41 (SD = 14.81), and gender distribution of 49.96% male and 50.04% female. With respect to political orientation, 44.35% of the sample define themself as right-wing ( N  = 452), 38.28% themselves as centrist ( N  = 390), and 17.37% as left-wing ( N  = 177) (this reflects the right-wing slant of the Israeli population that has been apparent in recent elections). The distribution of education and income levels was similar across the three groups (Education: F(2, 1120) = 0.20, P  < 0.82; Income: F(2, 1045) = 0.63, P  < 0.53). Sociodemographic characteristics of the participants are presented in Appendix A (Supporting Information), together with experimental balance checks.

The experiment incorporated three primary variables: the predictor variable (exposure to cyberattacks), the dependent variable (support for cybersecurity policies), and the mediator variable (threat perception). Sociodemographic measures were also collected.

Predictor variable—exposure to cyberattacks

Exposure to cyberattacks was operationalized by random assignment to one of the three experimental treatments described above—lethal cyberattacks/nonlethal cyberattacks/control condition.

Dependent variable: support for cybersecurity policies

Support for cybersecurity policies was examined using twelve questions taken from two scales developed by McCallister and Graves [ 63 , 64 ]. After separating out one item that reflected a unique form of cybersecurity policy, the remaining items were subjected to a principal component analysis (PCA), which highlighted different aspects of cybersecurity policy. Our criteria for the factor dimension extraction was an eigenvalue greater than one for number of dimensions, and factor loading greater than 0.35, for dimension assignment. We applied the PCA extraction method with the Varimax rotation to construct orthogonal factors [ 65 ]. This procedure gave rise to two clearly distinguishable cyber policy dimensions. Following this process, we combined the two remaining items that were excluded due to poor loadings (loading < 0.35) to create a third policy dimension with a high correlation between the items ( r  = 0.617, P  < 0.001) (see Appendix B in the Supporting Information for the PCA and complete list of the items used to construct each scale). The final three measures of cybersecurity policies reflected the breadth of available policy options, which emphasized different levels of government intervention and oversight strategies. The first of these is cybersecurity prevention policy (CPP); the second is cybersecurity alert policy (CAP); and the third is cybersecurity oversight policy (COP).

The cybersecurity prevention policy dimension (CPP) captures the idea that the state should mandate commercial companies to implement minimum levels of cybersecurity to prevent damage. Respondents were asked questions such as: “should the state compel business owners to protect themselves against cyberattacks?” Cronbach's α was within an acceptable range at 0.720.

The cybersecurity oversight policy dimension (COP) refers to the notion that the state should directly intervene to offer cyber protection to its citizens and businesses. Relevant questions for this dimension included “should the state protect its citizens from cyberattacks?” Cronbach's α was within an acceptable range at 0.737.

The cybersecurity alert policy dimension (CAP) relates to the state's presumed responsibility to ensure citizens are alerted when a hack of a cyberattack is discovered. For example, a related question would ask: “should the state alert citizens after a successful attack on critical infrastructure?” As opposed to the prevention policy dimension that relates to measures that must be taken before a cyberattack, the alert policy focuses on the measures to be taken after an attack. Cronbach's α was slightly below acceptable range at 0.632. All questions were measured on a scale ranging from 1 (“completely disagree”) to 6 (“completely agree”).

Mediator: perceptions of cybersecurity threats

Threat perception pertaining to cyber threats was gauged using a five-item scale based on studies conducted in the United States [ 66 ]. Respondents were asked how concerned they feel about the possibility of an actual threat to their security. Respondents answered questions including: “To what extent does the idea of a cyberattack on Israel affect your sense of personal security?” and “To what extent does a cyberattack on Israel threaten the country's critical infrastructure?,” and the answers ranged from 1 (“not at all”) to 6 (“to a very great degree”). The internal consistency of this measure was very high (Alpha = 0.913).

Control variables

Control variables collected included political ideology (assessed through a self-reported five-point scale ranging from 1 [very conservative] to 5 [very liberal]), age, gender, marital status, religiosity, education, and income.

We also measured and controlled for participants’ past exposure to cyberattacks. To measure this variable, we adapted a four-item scale used to measure exposure to terrorism and political violence [ 67 , 35 ]. Items included questions that asked the extent to which the respondents, their friends and their family had ever suffered harm or loss from a cyberattack. Similarly to past studies, we did not calculate the internal reliability for past exposure, given that one type of exposure does not necessarily portend another type.

Preliminary analyses

We begin our analysis by testing the variance between the treatment groups regarding attitudes toward cybersecurity policies, to establish that the experimental conditions produce at least minimal levels of differences in the dependent variables. Hence, we conducted a one-way univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA), in which the different cyber policies were the dependent variables. The results indicated differences between the three groups in support for policies regarding cybersecurity alerts (CAP: F(2, 1020) = 4.61, P  < 0.010). No differences between groups were found in support for cybersecurity prevention policy or cybersecurity oversight policy (CPP: F(2, 1020) = 1.35, P  < 0.259; COP: F(2, 1020) = 0.94, P  < 0.39). We followed the CAP ANOVA analysis with pairwise comparisons using Bonferroni corrections, which revealed that the highest level of support for cybersecurity alerts was expressed by the group exposed to lethal cyberattacks on average, while the other two groups showed lower levels of support for this policy. These results support the conclusion that the differences in cybersecurity policy preferences between the three groups derive from the video stimulus, and not from differences in participants’ sociodemographic characteristics (see Appendix C in the Supporting Information for means and standard deviations of study variables, in all three manipulation groups).

In addition, we tested group differences regarding threat perceptions and found significant differences in threat perceptions between the three groups (F(2, 1020) = 21.68, P  < 0.001). The follow up pairwise comparisons with Bonferroni corrections, revealed that participants in both experimental groups (LC and NLC) expressed higher levels of threat perceptions in comparison to participants in the control group. These analyses provide sufficient preliminary support to conduct more complex analyses that integrate multiple effects in this triangle of exposure to cyberattacks, cyber threat perception, and support for cybersecurity policies.

Mediation analysis

To test hypothesis 3, we ran a path analysis model, i.e. a structural equation modeling with observed indicators only. In this model, the exposure was divided into lethal vs control and nonlethal vs control. More specifically, with regard to the mediation effect, the model structure included two pathways from the experimental conditions to support for cybersecurity policies: From the lethal vs control, and from nonlethal vs control through threat perceptions. The latter variable was expected to mediate the effect condition effects on cyber policy positions as proposed in the theory section.

In order to further investigate the mediation mechanism, we constructed an integrative path analysis model [ 53 ]. Running this model enables us to identify direct and indirect effects among all the study variables. We provide modeling results in the following Table 1 and an illustration of the path analysis model in Fig. 1 .

Empirical model results—direct effects of exposure to lethal and nonlethal attack groups vs control group. * P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001.

Path: analysis direct effects, standardized estimates

Standard error in parentheses; * P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001. NLC = non-ethal cyberattack; LC = lethal cyberattack.

Direct effects

Table 1 presents the results of the standardized estimates (beta coefficients) of each experimental group vis-à-vis the control group (i.e. NLC vs control, and LC vs control), perceptions of threat, past exposure to cyberattacks and socio demographic variables—gender, religiosity, education and political ideology—with the three dimensions of cybersecurity policies as the dependent variables. In the pairwise comparison of the experimental groups, which compares the lethal and nonlethal conditions to the control group, we find a larger direct effect in the LC (lethal) group compared with the NLC (nonlethal) group in predicting support for CAP.

A follow-up that compared the two regression weights further confirmed the stronger relative effect of the lethal exposure over the nonlethal exposure (H 2 : NLC-LC = −0.21 (0.10), P  = 0.047). This demonstrates support for our second hypothesis. People who were exposed to lethal cyberattacks tended to support cybersecurity policies that compel the government and security forces to alert citizens if they have evidence of citizens’ computers being hacked or if an act cyberattack is discovered (CAP) at higher levels than people who were exposed to nonlethal/economic cyberattacks compared with people in the control group.

Interestingly, this trend was reversed for the oversight policies (COP) form of cybersecurity regulation. Here, we identified a significant direct effect wherein exposure to nonlethal cyberattacks led to support for oversight policies (COP) at higher levels than respondents who were exposed to the lethal cyberattacks manipulation or the control group. However, the difference between the two treatment conditions was not significant (NLC-LC = 0.11(0.08), P  = 0.16). This indicates that exposure to any kind of cyberattack, lethal or nonlethal, predicts greater support for oversight regulation policies (COP) to the same extent. No direct effect was found between exposure to cyberattacks and support for prevention regulation policies (CPP). By breaking apart this analysis into different dimensions of cybersecurity polices our results reveal how exposure to different forms of cyberattacks contribute to support for distinct types of policy that emphasize oversight or intervention.

Most importantly, results indicate a significant direct effect of threat perceptions on all three dimensions of cybersecurity policy and higher levels of threat perception in the lethal cyber manipulation group compared with the nonlethal cyber manipulation group and the control group.

Mediating effects

Table 2 presents the indirect effects of each of the two treatment conditions in comparison to the control group for the three dimensions of cybersecurity policies—with threat perception as a mediator. The indirect effects are pathways from the independent variable to the policy variables through threat perceptions. In the path analysis model, each dependent variable, i.e. support for particular cybersecurity policies, could have two potential paths, one from the nonlethal condition and the one from the lethal condition. Altogether, six mediation pathways were tested. These indirect outcomes are illustrated in Fig. 1 . In the LC group we see a complete mediation effect of threat perceptions and no significant direct effect of exposure on COP support. This means that for those participants who were exposed to the lethal condition, the actual exposure was not as strong a predictor of policy support as the threat perception associated with the attacks.

Path: analysis mediation effects, standardized estimates

Standard error in parentheses; * P  < 0.05, ** P  < 0.01, *** P  < 0.001. In squared brackets 95% confidence interval with bias correction bootstrapping ( n  = 2000).

In our models predicting CAP, we see a partial mediation effect for both treatment groups, in addition to the direct effect that we described above. We see a larger indirect effect in the LC group than in the NLC group and this was confirmed by a test of difference. This indicates that people who were exposed to lethal cyberattacks reported higher levels of cyber threat perception as compared with people who were exposed to the nonlethal condition, and this heightened threat perception in turn led to more support for various cybersecurity polices.

Support for CAP (i.e. cybersecurity policies whereby the government or relevant organizations are expected to alert citizens if they have evidence of citizens’ computers being hacked or an act of cyberattack being detected) was predicted both by a direct effect of level of exposure to cyberattacks (NLC, LC) and by the mediation of threat perceptions.

Yet our models predicting support for oversight polices (COP) showed a different picture. In the NLC group we see a partial mediation of threat perceptions in addition to the direct effect that we found in the models shown in Table 2 . Support for COP (i.e. cybersecurity policies whereby the state should protect the country, organizations, and citizens from cyberattacks through direct government action) was predicted by a direct effect of NLC exposure and by the mediation of threat perceptions in both LC and NLC groups. In the LC group versus the control group, support of COP was predicted only through the mediation perceptions of threat. These results support our third hypothesis regarding the mediating role played by threat perception in predicting COP.

Our models predicting support for prevention policies (CPP) showed a complete mediation effect of threat perception in both experimental treatment groups. No direct effect of exposure on CPP was found, indicating that the mediating mechanism is the best predictor for CPP. Support for CPP (i.e. cybersecurity policies whereby the state compels commercial enterprises to install minimum thresholds of cybersecurity) was predicted by the indirect effect of threat perception.

These results emphasize the central role played by threat perception in predicting support for adopting stringent cybersecurity policies. What is especially noteworthy is that threat perception overrides past experience as the full mediation models indicate. For example, we found that when people are exposed to destructive cyberattacks, the level of perceived threat predicted support for adopting cybersecurity policies that required the state to protect citizens and organizations (COP). Similarly, we found that when it comes to predicting support for prevention policies—threat is the driving force.

In order to complement the indirect effect analyses and test the relative strength of the mediation pathways, we contrasted the indirect effects of the various groups on each policy option. According to the outcome estimates in Table 2 , model 3 has a significantly larger mediation effect compared with model 1 (difference = –0.014; 0.024 P  < 0.001) 2 , which indicates that within the NLC group, the mediation model is a stronger predictor of support for COP than CAP. In other words, participants who were exposed to the nonlethal condition were more likely to support oversight polices than alert policies.

Our findings draw on an experimental design that suggests that exposure to different types of cyberattacks intensifies perceptions of cyber threats and shifts political attitudes in support of stringent cybersecurity policies. We find that exposure to lethal cyberattacks affects individual-level political behavior in a manner akin to conventional terrorism [ 68–71 ]. This research was motivated by a desire to better understand what drives individuals to support strong or hardline cybersecurity policies, using Israel as a case study. The findings contribute to this research direction in a number of important ways.

First, exposure to lethal cyberattacks heightens perceptions of cyber threat to a greater degree than nonlethal/economic cyberattacks. Second, as a result of exposure to cyberattacks, respondents were willing to forfeit civil liberties and privacy in exchange for more security. Like conventional terrorism, cyberattacks with lethal consequences harden political attitudes, as individuals tend to support more government oversight, greater regulation of cybersecurity among commercial businesses, and the implementation of strategies to increase public awareness following cyberattacks. Third, our data suggest that in some cases the mere exposure to cyberattack, either lethal or nonlethal, affects the level of support for specific types of cybersecurity polices (stronger support of cybersecurity alert policies among participants in the lethal cyberattack manipulation, and stronger support of cybersecurity oversight policy among participants in the nonlethal cyberattack treatment group). In other cases, threat perception, rather than the exposure to the cyber-events themselves, drive the cognitive effects of cyberattacks on attitudes toward policy (A strong support for COP among the LC group was predicted only through the mediating role of threat perception, and support of CPP, in both manipulation groups was predicted only through a mediated pathway). Finally, we observed differences in the way our mediation model works in relation to different cybersecurity policies. The mediation model for the nonlethal condition group participants predicted greater support for cybersecurity policies focusing on oversight rather than policies focusing on alerting the public.

Our study examined public support for three distinct types of cybersecurity policies that we described as prevention policies, alert policies, and oversight policies. Each of these play a role in securing cyberspace, where the uncertainty regarding the form and nature of potential threats calls for a varied array of preventive actions [ 36 , 37 ]. Each of these policies raises questions about the delicate balancing act between privacy and security demands. In reality, policy approaches are likely to combine several of these elements—yet it behooves us to first consider each of them independently since very little is known about the public knowledge and familiarity with different cybersecurity policies. While preliminary research has looked at public support for cybersecurity preferences in general [ 41 ], these have yet to consider the varied approaches to cybersecurity. To that end, in the current paper we tried to simplify the different cybersecurity polices as much as possible based on real-world policies.

Overall, the study provides evidence that exposure to cyberattacks predicts support for cybersecurity policies through the mediating effect of threat perception. Yet our discovery of differential effects depending on the type of cybersecurity policy being proposed adds a new level of nuance that should be probed further in subsequent studies. More so, results indicate that the public worry and concern in the aftermath of cyberattacks leads directly to calls for governmental intervention. This information sheds light on public opinion processes and helps inform our understanding how individuals will likely respond to new cyber threats. It may also help policymakers understand the complex emotions and cognitions evoked by attacks, which can improve policy formulations that respond to the needs of the public.

Future studies should also investigate how fear appeals intervene in this mechanism, and how to motivate people to take cyber threats more seriously in a way that leads to positive behavioral change.

Participants who were exposed to the lethal manipulation supported cybersecurity policies that focus on alerting the public in cases of cyberattacks more than participants in the two other groups. On the other hand, participants who were exposed to the nonlethal manipulation tended to support cybersecurity policies that call for state oversight of cybersecurity. We found no evidence that any type of exposure has a direct effect on support for polices mandating minimum thresholds of cybersecurity in the commercial arena.

One possible explanation for these results is that thus far, cyberattacks have caused economic damage, but lethal cyberattacks that vividly resemble terrorism are a significantly rarer phenomenon. Hence, participants who were exposed to lethal terror cyberattacks supported cybersecurity policies that would alert them and keep them informed about impending cyber threats. Policies that focus on oversight are perceived as less important during violent terror attacks. On the other hand, exposure to nonlethal cyberattacks, which are typically focused on economic gain, is more common. The economic damage caused by cyberattacks is estimated to reach $6 trillion by 2021 [ 72 ]. As such, participants in the nonlethal manipulation may have regarded cyberattacks causing economic damage as more likely and therefore supported polices that will bolster digital protections.

We note a key condition about the temporal nature of these findings. In analyzing the effect of exposure to cyberattacks, this study focuses on people's immediate response following exposure to cyber threats. Assessing people's short-term responses is valuable as the responses speak to the direction of the political and psychological effects. Yet what is missing from this picture (and beyond the scope of our research design), is the longevity of the response, which speaks to the strength of the effect. If the measured distress and political outcomes swiftly dissipate, then the policy relevance of our findings comes into question.

The literature is split on the question of the temporal durability of attitudinal shifts in the aftermath of major attacks. There is one school of thought that holds that most political effects stemming from political violence or terrorism are fleeting, and that the public is broadly desensitized to political violence [ 73–75 ]. Yet a second school of thought suggests that exposure to attacks can trigger prolonged effects and lasting shifts in political and psychological attitudes. Brandon & Silke [ 76 ] assert that while the distress triggered by exposure dissipates over time, this is not an instantaneous process. Several longitudinal studies following the Oklahama bombing and 9/11 found lingering harms, with exposed individuals reporting elevated levels of psychological distress and altered political attitudes for months or years following the event [ 77–79 ].

In applying this to the case of cyberattacks, there is insufficient evidence to positively determine the longevity of the political and psychological effects that we identified in our study. We anticipate that the effects will be more than fleeting, since the novelty of cyber threats means that people have yet to undergo any cognitive or emotional desensitization to cyberattacks [ 80 ]. However, we acknowledge that this this position requires further empirical substantiation in future research.

A central conclusion of this study is that the implementation of cybersecurity regulations should take account of public perception of cyber threats and public exposure to cyberattacks. This position challenges two unspoken yet ubiquitous notions in the field of cybersecurity. First, the formulation of cybersecurity policies—in a manner akin to national security and espionage discussions—has typically taken place without public input due to the perception that it is a question best left to experts with engineering or national security expertise [ 81 ]. Scholars argue that this complete abdication of cybersecurity policy to specialists is a profound mistake, since excluding “the general public from any meaningful voice in cyber policymaking removes citizens from democratic governance in an area where our welfare is deeply implicated” [ 82 ]. Functional cybersecurity relies on good practices by the ordinary public, and the failure of cybersecurity awareness campaigns to effectively change behavior may well be linked to the lack of public input in its regulation [ 81 ]. Our findings indicate that growing civilian exposure to cyberattacks leads to more defined attitudes toward specific cybersecurity regulations through the mechanism of heightened threat perception. Governments will increasingly need to engage the public as one of the stakeholders in effecting new cyber regulations.

A second conceptual dilemma about the role of public exposure and opinion has to do with the question of whether cybersecurity is a public good deserving of government investment and regulation at all. Much of the field of cybersecurity is dominated by private enterprise, with government involvement taking place in limited ways. Support for government intervention in the realm of cybersecurity is premised on the astronomical public costs of cybercrime, the threat of cyberterror attacks, and the claim of a market failure in the provision of cybersecurity whose negative externalities in the absence of government involvement would cause substantial national damage [ 83 ]. A prominent counter-school of thought, resting on a belief that the private market is the most efficient system of allocating economic resources, claims that there is no need for government intervention in the cybersecurity market [ 84 ]. These proponents of private sector cybersecurity suggest that the private sector can more effectively achieve cybersecurity outcomes, an assertion that is backed up by the fact that private spending on cybersecurity in 2018 reached USD $96 billion [ 85 ]. This raises the question of how civilian exposure to cyberattacks and the subsequent support for cybersecurity regulation can translate to real outcomes if the market responds to both public and private interests, which take account of public opinion and civilian threat perception in different ways.

Seeing that cyber threats are continuously evolving, there are opportunities to expand and consolidate this research in future studies. In the current article, we focus on the effect of exposure to lethal and nonlethal cyberattacks on support for different types of cybersecurity policies among Israeli participants. Yet despite this singular geographic focus, the results offer lessons that can be applied widely. Like several other Western countries, Israel has been repeatedly exposed to publicly reported cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. And, similarly to American and some European countries, Israel has high levels of Internet penetration and publicly renowned levels of cybersecurity readiness to deal with such attacks. Past studies that examined public perceptions of cyber threats have replicated the findings across multiple countries. Shandler et al . [ 80 ] found that psychological responses to internalized reports of cyberattacks explains support for military retaliation, and that this mechanism applies similarly in Israel, the United States, and England. Though requiring additional research, the evidence suggests that cyber threats operate via an underlying psycho-political mechanism that transcends national borders. In fact, the effects of cyberattacks may prove weaker in Israel than elsewhere as the constant exposure among Israelis to political violence places digital violence in the context of a political struggle that has, in many ways, fixed and acceptable costs [ 34 ]. Therefore, we believe that an Israeli sample offers major advantages in understanding the effects of cyberattacks among other Western nations. Nonetheless, we encourage future studies to corroborate these findings in different settings.

A second area where our findings could benefit from additional research relates to the nature of the media exposure. In this study, we exposed respondents to "initial" media reports about major cyberattacks where there is minimal information pertaining to the identity of the attacker and the type of attack that was conducted. While this in many ways reflects the reality of media reports about cyberattacks, it does not discount that journalists will sometimes make inferences about the details of an attack, and that later reports in the days and weeks following an attack will include far more detailed information. More so, this article bears implications for a wide literature beyond the political violence discipline. The public discussion regarding digital privacy and surveillance has spurred crucial new research on the dynamics of digital insecurity. In communications and media studies, for example, scientists are focusing on information-age warfare via different social media platforms, and early results show that citizens are as active in correcting disinformation online as they are in spreading disinformation [ 86 , 87 ]. The debate in the field of business management is also developing as it focuses on consumer expectations surrounding information technology and big data, as well as on the roles and responsibilities of public and private actors in securing personal data [ 88 , 89 ].

Cyber threats are a critical and growing component of national security. As this threat continues to grow all over the world, both in its public perception and in the true scope of the threat, the need to implement strong cybersecurity regulations will grow as well. Our findings indicate that particular forms of exposure to cyberattacks can contribute to support for various types of cybersecurity legislation and contribute to their public legitimacy. This is especially important since the introduction of these regulations constitutes a sacrifice of civil liberties, a sacrifice that citizens are prone to support only under particular conditions.

Though a DDoS attack, e.g. may not trigger physical casualties, its crippling of emergency services and telecommunications could catastrophically amplify the second- and third-order damage during a physical attack; for more, see Catherine A. Theohary and John W. Rollins,   Cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism: In brief (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2015).

We also see a marginal significant effect between mediation 1 and 5 and 2 and 6. The differences between mediation 1 and mediation 5 show mediation 5 (NLC/control-threat-CPP) has a marginal significant larger mediation effect compared with mediation 1 (NLC/control-threat-CAP) (difference = –0.035; 0.035 P  = 0.073). This means that within the NLC group the mediation model predicts stronger predicting CPP than CAP. In other words, participants who were exposed to the nonlethal (NLC) condition were more likely to support CPP than CAP. We saw that the CAP is stronger in the LC group. Another marginal significant effect was found between mediation 2 and mediation 6. The differences between mediation 2 and mediation 6 show mediation 6 (LC/control-threat-CPP) has a marginal significant larger mediation effect compared with mediation 2 (LC/control-threat-CAP) (difference = −0.044; 0.024 P  = 0.062). This means that within the LC group the mediation model predicts stronger predicting CPP than CAP. In other words, participants who were exposed to the lethal (LC) condition were more likely to support CPP than CAP. We saw a direct effect of LC on CAP.

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Cybersecurity trends: Looking over the horizon

Cybersecurity has always been a never-ending race, but the rate of change is accelerating. Companies are continuing to invest in technology to run their businesses. Now, they are layering more systems into their IT networks to support remote work, enhance the customer experience, and generate value, all of which creates potential new vulnerabilities.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Jim Boehm , Dennis Dias, Charlie Lewis, Kathleen Li, and Daniel Wallance, representing views from McKinsey’s Risk & Resilience Practice.

At the same time, adversaries—no longer limited to individual actors—include highly sophisticated organizations that leverage integrated tools and capabilities with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The scope of the threat is growing, and no organization is immune. Small and midsize enterprises, municipalities, and state and federal governments face such risks along with large companies. Even today’s most sophisticated cybercontrols, no matter how effective, will soon be obsolete.

In this environment, leadership must answer key questions: “Are we prepared for accelerated digitization in the next three to five years?” and, more specifically, “Are we looking far enough forward to understand how today’s technology investments will have cybersecurity implications in the future?” (Exhibit 1).

McKinsey’s work helping global organizations reinforce their cyberdefenses shows that many companies recognize the need to achieve a step change in their capabilities for cybersecurity  and to ensure the resilience of their technology. The solution is to reinforce their defenses by looking forward—anticipating the emerging cyberthreats of the future and understanding the slew of new defensive capabilities that companies can use today and others they can plan to use tomorrow (see sidebar, “Maintaining vigilance over time”).

Maintaining vigilance over time

Proactively mitigating cybersecurity threats and evaluating over-the-horizon cybersecurity capabilities is not a one-time process. It requires ongoing vigilance and a structured approach to ensure that organizations proactively scan the environment and adjust their cyber stance accordingly. We see leading organizations adopting a three-step process:

• Validate cybercontrols—especially emerging ones—technically to ensure your readiness for evolving threats and technologies.
• Challenge your cyberstrategy to refresh the road map with emerging capabilities and approaches.
• Adopt a formal program of record to continually review your cyberstrategy, technologies, and processes against shifts in cybersecurity trends.

Three cybersecurity trends with large-scale implications

Companies can address and mitigate the disruptions of the future only by taking a more proactive, forward-looking stance—starting today. Over the next three to five years, we expect three major cybersecurity trends that cross-cut multiple technologies to have the biggest implications for organizations.

1. On-demand access to ubiquitous data and information platforms is growing

Mobile platforms, remote work, and other shifts increasingly hinge on high-speed access to ubiquitous and large data sets, exacerbating the likelihood of a breach. The marketplace for web-hosting services is expected to generate $183.18 billion by 2026. 1 Fortune Business Insight. Organizations collect far more data about customers—everything from financial transactions to electricity consumption to social-media views—to understand and influence purchasing behavior and more effectively forecast demand. In 2020, on average, every person on Earth created 1.7 megabytes of data each second. 2 “Data never sleeps 6.0,” Domo. With the greater importance of the cloud, enterprises are increasingly responsible for storing, managing, and protecting these data 3 John Gantz, David Reinsel, and John Rydning, The digitization of the world: From edge to core , IDC, November 2018. and for meeting the challenges of explosive data volumes. To execute such business models, companies need new technology platforms, including data lakes that can aggregate information, such as the channel assets of vendors and partners, across environments. Companies are not only gathering more data but also centralizing them, storing them on the cloud, and granting access to an array of people and organizations, including third parties such as suppliers.

Many recent high-profile attacks exploited this expanded data access. The Sunburst hack, in 2020, entailed malicious code spread to customers during regular software updates. Similarly, attackers in early 2020 used compromised employee credentials from a top hotel chain’s third-party application to access more than five million guest records. 4 David Uberti, “Marriott reveals breach that exposed data of up to 5.2 million customers,” Wall Street Journal , March 31, 2020.

2. Hackers are using AI, machine learning, and other technologies to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks

The stereotypical hacker working alone is no longer the main threat. Today, cyberhacking is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, 5 “Cybersecurity: Hacking has become a $300 billion dollar industry,” InsureTrust. complete with institutional hierarchies and R&D budgets. Attackers use advanced tools, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. Over the next several years, they will be able to expedite—from weeks to days or hours—the end-to-end attack life cycle, from reconnaissance through exploitation. For example, Emotet, an advanced form of malware targeting banks, can change the nature of its attacks. In 2020, leveraging advanced AI and machine-learning techniques to increase its effectiveness, it used an automated process to send out contextualized phishing emails that hijacked other email threats—some linked to COVID-19 communications.

Other technologies and capabilities are making already known forms of attacks, such as ransomware and phishing, more prevalent. Ransomware as a service and cryptocurrencies have substantially reduced the cost of launching ransomware attacks, whose number has doubled each year since 2019. Other types of disruptions often trigger a spike in these attacks. During the initial wave of COVID-19, from February 2020 to March 2020, the number of ransomware attacks in the world as a whole spiked by 148 percent, for example. 6 VMware security blog , “Amid COVID-19, global orgs see a 148% spike in ransomware attacks; finance industry heavily targeted,” April 15, 2020. Phishing attacks increased by 510 percent from January to February 2020. 7 Brian Carlson, “Top cybersecurity statistics, trends, and facts,” CSO, October 7, 2021.

3. Ever-growing regulatory landscape and continued gaps in resources, knowledge, and talent will outpace cybersecurity

Many organizations lack sufficient cybersecurity talent, knowledge, and expertise —and the shortfall is growing. Broadly, cyberrisk management has not kept pace with the proliferation of digital and analytics transformations, and many companies are not sure how to identify and manage digital risks. Compounding the challenge, regulators are increasing their guidance of corporate cybersecurity capabilities—often with the same level of oversight and focus applied to credit and liquidity risks in financial services and to operational and physical-security risks in critical infrastructure.

Cyberrisk management has not kept pace with the proliferation of digital and analytics transformations, and many companies are not sure how to identify and manage digital risks.

At the same time, companies face stiffer compliance requirements—a result of growing privacy concerns and high-profile breaches. There are now approximately 100 cross-border data flow regulations. Cybersecurity teams are managing additional data and reporting requirements stemming from the White House Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and the advent of mobile-phone operating systems that ask users how they want data from each individual application to be used.

Building over-the-horizon defensive capabilities

For each of these shifts, we see defensive capabilities that organizations can develop to mitigate the risk and impact of future cyberthreats. To be clear, these capabilities are not perfectly mapped to individual shifts, and many apply to more than one. Management teams should consider all of these capabilities and focus on those most relevant to the unique situation and context of their companies (Exhibit 2).

Responses to trend one: Zero-trust capabilities and large data sets for security purposes

Mitigating the cybersecurity risks of on-demand access to ubiquitous data requires four cybersecurity capabilities: zero-trust capabilities, behavioral analytics, elastic log monitoring, and homomorphic encryption.

Zero-trust architecture (ZTA). Across industrial nations, approximately 25 percent of all workers now work remotely three to five days a week. 8 Global surveys of consumer sentiment during the coronavirus crisis , McKinsey. Hybrid and remote work, increased cloud access, and Internet of Things (IoT) integration create potential vulnerabilities. A ZTA shifts the focus of cyberdefense away from the static perimeters around physical networks and toward users, assets, and resources, thus mitigating the risk from decentralized data. Access is more granularly enforced by policies: even if users have access to the data environment, they may not have access to sensitive data. Organizations should tailor the adoption of zero-trust capabilities to the threat and risk landscape they actually face and to their business objectives. They should also consider standing up red-team testing to validate the effectiveness and coverage of their zero-trust capabilities.

Behavioral analytics. Employees are a key vulnerability for organizations. Analytics solutions can monitor attributes such as access requests or the health of devices and establish a baseline to identify anomalous intentional or unintentional user behavior or device activity. These tools can not only enable risk-based authentication and authorization but also orchestrate preventive and incident response measures.

Elastic log monitoring for large data sets. Massive data sets and decentralized logs resulting from advances such as big data and IoT complicate the challenge of monitoring activity. Elastic log monitoring is a solution based on several open-source platforms that, when combined, allow companies to pull log data from anywhere in the organization into a single location and then to search, analyze, and visualize the data in real time. Native log-sampling features in core tools can ease an organization’s log management burden and clarify potential compromises.

Homomorphic encryption. This technology allows users to work with encrypted data without first decrypting and thus gives third parties and internal collaborators safer access to large data sets. It also helps companies meet more stringent data privacy requirements. Recent breakthroughs in computational capacity and performance now make homomorphic encryption practical for a wider range of applications.

Responses to trend two: Using automation to combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks

To counter more sophisticated attacks driven by AI and other advanced capabilities, organizations should take a risk-based approach to automation and automatic responses to attacks. Automation should focus on defensive capabilities like security operations center (SOC) countermeasures and labor-intensive activities, such as identity and access management (IAM) and reporting. AI and machine learning should be used to stay abreast of changing attack patterns. Finally, the development of both automated technical and automatic organizational responses to ransomware threats helps mitigate risk in the event of an attack.

Automation implemented through a risk-based approach. As the level of digitization accelerates, organizations can use automation to handle lower-risk and rote processes, freeing up resources for higher-value activities. Critically, automation decisions should be based on risk assessments and segmentation to ensure that additional vulnerabilities are not inadvertently created. For example, organizations can apply automated patching, configuration, and software upgrades to low-risk assets but use more direct oversight for higher-risk ones.

Use of defensive AI and machine learning for cybersecurity. Much as attackers adopt AI and machine-learning techniques, cybersecurity teams will need to evolve and scale up the same capabilities. Specifically, organizations can use these technologies and outlier patterns to detect and remediate noncompliant systems. Teams can also leverage machine learning to optimize workflows and technology stacks so that resources are used in the most effective way over time.

Technical and organizational responses to ransomware. As the sophistication, frequency, and range of ransomware attacks increase, organizations must respond with technical and operational changes. The technical changes include using resilient data repositories and infrastructure, automated responses to malicious encryption, and advanced multifactor authentication to limit the potential impact of an attack, as well as continually addressing cyber hygiene. The organizational changes include conducting tabletop exercises, developing detailed and multidimensional playbooks, and preparing for all options and contingencies—including executive response decisions—to make the business response automatic.

Responses to trend three: Embedding security in technology capabilities to address ever-growing regulatory scrutiny and resource gaps

Increased regulatory scrutiny and gaps in knowledge, talent, and expertise reinforce the need to build and embed security in technology capabilities as they are designed, built, and implemented. What’s more, capabilities such as security as code and a software bill of materials help organizations to deploy security capabilities and stay ahead of the inquiries of regulators.

Secure software development. Rather than treating cybersecurity as an afterthought, companies should embed it in the design of software from inception, including the use of a software bill of materials (described below). One important way to create a secure software development life cycle (SSDLC) is to have security and technology risk teams engage with developers throughout each stage of development. Another is to ensure that developers learn certain security capabilities best employed by development teams themselves (for instance, threat modeling, code and infrastructure scanning, and static and dynamic testing). Depending on the activity, some security teams can shift to agile product approaches, some can adopt a hybrid approach based on agile-kanban tickets, and some—especially highly specialized groups, such as penetration testers and security architects—can “flow to work” in alignment with agile sprints and ceremonies.

Taking advantage of X as a service. Migrating workloads and infrastructure to third-party cloud environments (such as platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, and hyperscale providers) can better secure organizational resources and simplify management for cyberteams. Cloud providers not only handle many routine security, patching, and maintenance activities but also offer automation capabilities and scalable services. Some organizations seek to consolidate vendors for the sake of simplicity, but it can also be important to diversify partners strategically to limit exposure to performance or availability issues.

Infrastructure and security as code. Standardizing and codifying infrastructure and control-engineering processes can simplify the management of hybrid and multicloud environments and increase the system’s resilience. This approach enables processes such as orchestrated patching, as well as rapid provisioning and deprovisioning.

Software bill of materials. As compliance requirements grow, organizations can mitigate the administrative burden by formally detailing all components and supply chain relationships used in software. Like a detailed bill of materials, this documentation would list open-source and third-party components in a codebase through new software development processes, code-scanning tools, industry standards, and supply chain requirements. In addition to mitigating supply chain risks, detailed software documentation helps ensure that security teams are prepared for regulatory inquiries.

Digital disruption is inevitable and will lead to rapid technology-driven change. As organizations make large-scale investments in technology—whether in the spirit of innovation or from necessity—they must be aware of the associated cyberrisks. Attackers are exploiting the vulnerabilities that new technologies introduce, and even the best cybercontrols rapidly become obsolete in this accelerating digital world. Organizations that seek to position themselves most effectively for the next five years will need to take a relentless and proactive approach to building over-the-horizon defensive capabilities.

Jim Boehm is a partner in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office; Charlie Lewis is an associate partner in the Stamford office; and Kathleen Li is a specialist in the New York office, where Daniel Wallance is an associate partner. Dennis Dias is a senior adviser of McKinsey.

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Cyber Security Essay

Cyber security is one of the most important topics in today’s digital world. With technology evolving at an unprecedented pace and more companies going online than ever before, it’s essential that everyone understands the basics of cyber security. Here are some sample essays on cyber security.

• 100 Words Essay On Cyber Security

As a student in today's digital world, it's important to remember the importance of cyber security. Today, almost everything that we do is done online or through the internet, and that means our personal information, like our passwords, banking information, and even our school work, is vulnerable to cyber security threats.

200 Words Essay On Cyber Security

500 words essay on cyber security.

Cyber security is the practice of protecting networks, systems, and programs from digital attacks. These attacks can come from many different sources, including hackers, viruses, and even from other people. In order to stay safe online, it's essential to understand the basics of cyber security. Cyber security is an ever-evolving field, and it's important for school students to stay informed and take the necessary steps to protect themselves online.

School students are the future of our society, and it's important to teach them the importance of cyber security from an early age. Cyber security is an ever-increasing problem in our digital world, and it's up to us to ensure that our students are aware of the risks and dangers that come with the internet.

What Is Cyber Security?

Cyber security is the practice of protecting digital devices and networks from unauthorised access and malicious activities. With the rise of technology and its integration into our lives, cyber security has become an integral part of our lives, and it's important for school students to understand the need for cyber security measures.

How To Protect Yourself From Cyber Crime?

One of the most important ways to protect your devices and networks from cyber threats is to create strong passwords and never share them with anyone else. Passwords are the first line of defence against cyber attacks, and it's important that school students understand how to create and use strong passwords. Additionally, students should be taught to never share personal information online, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and bank account information.

Staying informed is the best way to stay ahead of the latest threats, and it's important for students to stay up-to-date on the latest cyber security news and updates.

Cyber security is the use of antivirus and anti-malware software. These programs are designed to detect and block malicious programs, such as viruses, worms, and Trojans, before they can do any damage to your devices and networks. By teaching our students about the importance of cyber security, we can ensure that they will be better prepared to protect themselves and their devices from cyber threats.

Cyber Security is essential for all those who regularly and frequently use electronic devices. With so much of our sensitive data and documents stored on these gadgets, it is essential to ensure their protection. There are several ways to protect your devices from cyber threats, such as using Antivirus and Antimalware software, and implementing End-User Protection solutions. Taking the necessary steps to secure your devices can help keep your data safe and secure.

Causes Of Cyber Crime

There are many different causes of cybercrime, but most can be categorised into one of three categories:

Personal gain | This is perhaps the most common motivation for cybercrime, as it can be very lucrative. Cybercriminals may engage in activities such as identity theft, phishing scams, and credit card fraud in order to make money.

Revenge or vandalism | Some cybercriminals commit crimes out of a desire for revenge or simply to cause havoc. They may engage in activities such as denial of service attacks, website defacement, or even doxxing (releasing personal information online).

Political or ideological motivations | In some cases, cybercrime is committed for political or ideological reasons. For example, hackers may attack a website in order to protest its content or disrupt its operations.

How To Increase Cyber Security

For school students, cyber security is especially important. Many students use the internet for their studies, making them more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Hackers may try to access school networks, steal student data, or even disrupt classes. It’s important for students to know how to protect themselves from cyber threats. There are some simple steps that you can take to ensure your safety and security.

The first step is to create strong passwords for all of your accounts. Passwords should be hard to guess and should never be shared with anyone. Make sure to use a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. It's also important to change your passwords regularly.

Next, you should be sure to protect your personal information. This means making sure that you don't share your passwords or other sensitive information online. Be sure to use an up-to-date antivirus program to scan your computer regularly for malicious software.

Finally, be sure to stay informed about the latest cyber security threats. Keeping up with the news and reading articles on cyber security can help you stay aware of the latest threats and how to protect yourself against them.

By following these tips, you can stay safe online and protect your personal information. Cyber security is an important issue and it's important to take it seriously. If you take the time to learn more about cyber security and make sure you take steps to protect yourself, you can stay safe online and enjoy the benefits of today's digital world.

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Empowering Protection in the Digital Age

The Importance of Cyber Security in Today’s World

• By: Samuel Norris
• Time to read: 24 min.

With the rapid advancement of technology and the increasing reliance on digital systems, the need for cyber security has become more crucial than ever. In this essay, we will explore the importance of cyber security in protecting our personal information, securing businesses and governments from cyber threats, and maintaining the trust and stability of our online world.

The importance of cyber security in protecting personal information

In today’s digital age, the importance of cyber security in protecting personal information cannot be overstated. With the increasing prevalence of cybercrime and the ever-growing threat landscape, individuals and organizations must be vigilant in safeguarding their sensitive data. Cyber security measures are crucial not only to protect personal information from unauthorized access but also to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of data.

One of the primary reasons why cyber security is essential is the rising number of cyber threats, including hacking, phishing, malware, and ransomware. These malicious activities can result in identity theft, financial loss, reputational damage, and even legal consequences. By implementing robust cyber security measures, individuals can minimize the risk of falling victim to such cyber threats and ensure the safety of their personal information.

Moreover, the increasing reliance on digital platforms and online services has made personal information more vulnerable than ever before. From online banking to social media accounts, individuals store a wealth of personal data on various digital platforms. Without proper cyber security measures in place, this information is at risk of being exploited by cybercriminals. Therefore, individuals must take proactive steps to secure their personal information and prevent unauthorized access.

Furthermore, cyber security is not just the responsibility of individuals but also of organizations. Businesses, government agencies, and other institutions hold vast amounts of personal information for their clients and customers. Failing to protect this data can lead to severe consequences, not only for the individuals whose information is compromised but also for the organization’s reputation and financial stability. By investing in robust cyber security measures, organizations can demonstrate their commitment to protecting personal information and build trust with their stakeholders.

In conclusion, the importance of cyber security in protecting personal information cannot be understated. With the increasing prevalence of cyber threats, individuals and organizations must prioritize the implementation of comprehensive cyber security measures. By doing so, they can safeguard personal data, minimize the risk of cybercrime, and maintain the trust and confidence of their customers and clients.

Cyber attacks and their impact on businesses and economies

Cyber attacks have emerged as a major threat to businesses and economies across the globe. These malicious acts of hacking, data breaches, and online fraud have a profound impact on the stability and growth of businesses, as well as the overall health of economies. The perplexing nature of cyber attacks is evident in their ability to exploit vulnerabilities in digital systems, often catching businesses off guard. With burstiness, cyber attacks can occur suddenly and unexpectedly, causing significant disruption, financial losses, and reputational damage. Furthermore, the low predictability of these attacks makes it difficult for businesses to effectively safeguard their digital assets and stay one step ahead of cybercriminals. As businesses increasingly rely on technology for daily operations and economic transactions, the importance of strong cyber security measures cannot be overstated. Implementing robust security protocols, such as firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication, is crucial for businesses to mitigate the risks posed by cyber attacks. Additionally, investing in employee training and awareness programs can help build a cyber-aware workforce, reducing the likelihood of successful attacks. In conclusion, the impact of cyber attacks on businesses and economies is undeniable, with a high level of perplexity and burstiness, and a low level of predictability. By prioritizing cyber security, businesses can protect their operations, customer data, and financial stability, ultimately contributing to the resilience and success of economies worldwide.

The role of cyber security in safeguarding national security

In today’s interconnected world, the role of cyber security in safeguarding national security has become increasingly vital. With the rapid advancement of technology and the proliferation of digital systems, the potential threats to a nation’s security have also multiplied. Cyber attacks can target critical infrastructure, government networks, and even military systems, causing widespread disruption and damage. Therefore, it is imperative for governments to prioritize cyber security measures to protect their nations from these evolving threats.

Cyber security plays a crucial role in safeguarding national security by preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information and networks. It involves the implementation of robust cybersecurity protocols, such as firewalls, encryption, and multi-factor authentication, to defend against cyber threats. By securing networks and systems, governments can ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical data, thereby safeguarding national secrets, defense strategies, and citizen information.

Moreover, cyber security helps to maintain the stability and functionality of a nation’s infrastructure. As more critical services, such as power grids, transportation systems, and healthcare facilities, rely on digital networks, they become vulnerable to cyber attacks. By investing in cyber security measures, governments can mitigate the risk of disruption to these essential services, thereby protecting the safety and well-being of their citizens. Additionally, cyber security plays a pivotal role in defending against attacks on financial systems, preventing economic instability and preserving national prosperity.

Furthermore, cyber security is crucial for protecting national defense capabilities. Military networks and command and control systems are prime targets for cyber attacks, which can compromise operational readiness, disrupt communications, and undermine strategic planning. By implementing stringent cyber security measures, governments can ensure the resilience and effectiveness of their military forces, thereby safeguarding national defense capabilities and deterring potential adversaries.

In conclusion, the role of cyber security in safeguarding national security is of utmost importance in today’s digital age. By prioritizing and investing in robust cyber security measures, governments can protect critical infrastructure, defend against cyber attacks, and ensure the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative for nations to stay ahead by continuously enhancing their cyber security capabilities and collaborating with international partners to combat cyber threats.

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The evolving threat landscape and the need for stronger cyber security measures

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the threat of cyber attacks looms larger than ever before. As technology continues to advance, so do the tactics and sophistication of cyber criminals. This escalating threat landscape has necessitated the implementation of stronger and more robust cyber security measures .

Gone are the days when simple antivirus software and firewalls were enough to protect sensitive information. In the face of constantly evolving threats such as ransomware, phishing scams, and data breaches, organizations and individuals alike must stay one step ahead to safeguard their digital assets.

The first reason why we need stronger cyber security measures is the sheer volume and complexity of cyber threats. Cyber criminals are constantly devising new ways to exploit vulnerabilities in software, networks, and even human behavior. From malware that can invade our devices without detection to social engineering techniques that manipulate individuals into revealing sensitive information, the tactics used by cyber criminals are becoming more sophisticated and harder to predict. Without robust cyber security measures in place, organizations are at risk of falling victim to these evolving threats.

Furthermore, the increasing interconnectedness of devices and systems through the Internet of Things (IoT) has created new avenues for cyber attacks. From smart homes to critical infrastructure, any device connected to the internet can potentially be compromised. This highlights the need for stronger cyber security measures to protect not only personal information but also the safety and functionality of essential services.

Another crucial reason for stronger cyber security measures is the potential impact of a successful cyber attack. The consequences can be devastating, both financially and reputationally. Organizations can face significant financial losses due to stolen data, disruption of operations, and the cost of remediation. Moreover, the loss of customer trust and the damage to a company’s reputation can be irreparable.

In conclusion, the ever-evolving threat landscape necessitates the adoption of stronger cyber security measures . The increasing volume and complexity of cyber threats, the expanding IoT, and the potential consequences of a successful attack all underscore the importance of prioritizing cyber security. Investing in robust cyber security measures is not only a proactive approach to protecting sensitive data and systems but also a vital step in safeguarding the overall well-being of organizations and individuals in our digital world.

Cyber security best practices for individuals and organizations

Cyber security is not just a concern for governments and large corporations; it is equally crucial for individuals and small organizations. In today’s digital age, where cyber threats are constantly evolving, implementing best practices is essential to protect sensitive information and maintain data integrity. This article will discuss some of the top cyber security best practices that individuals and organizations should follow.

• Strong and Unique Passwords: One of the simplest yet most effective ways to enhance cyber security is by using strong and unique passwords. Avoid using common passwords or personal information that can be easily guessed. Consider using a password manager to generate and securely store complex passwords.
• Two-Factor Authentication: Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) whenever possible. This adds an extra layer of security by requiring a second verification step, such as a code sent to your mobile device, in addition to your password.
• Regular Software Updates: Keeping all software and operating systems up to date is crucial. Software updates often include patches for known vulnerabilities, which hackers can exploit. Set up automatic updates to ensure that you are always running the latest versions.
• Secure Wi-Fi Networks: Protect your home or office Wi-Fi network with a strong and unique password. Additionally, consider enabling network encryption, such as WPA2, to secure the communication between devices and the network.
• Employee Training and Awareness: Organizations should prioritize cyber security training and awareness programs for their employees. This helps ensure that everyone understands the importance of following security protocols and recognizes potential threats like phishing emails or suspicious links.
• Regular Data Backups: Regularly backing up important data is crucial in case of a cyber attack or data loss. Store backups on separate devices or in the cloud, and test the restoration process periodically to ensure the data can be recovered.
• Firewalls and Antivirus Software: Install and regularly update firewalls and antivirus software on all devices. These security tools provide an additional layer of protection against malware, viruses, and other cyber threats.
• Secure Web Browsing: Be cautious when browsing the internet. Avoid clicking on suspicious links or downloading files from untrusted sources. Use reputable web browsers and consider using browser extensions that provide additional security features.

By implementing these cyber security best practices, individuals and organizations can significantly reduce the risk of falling victim to cyber attacks and protect sensitive information from unauthorized access. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and stay secure!

The cost of cyber attacks and the value of investing in cyber security

In today’s digital age, the cost of cyber attacks is staggering. The value of investing in cyber security cannot be overstated. Cyber attacks not only lead to significant financial losses for businesses, but also result in reputational damage, legal consequences, and potential customer distrust. It is crucial for organizations to understand the true extent of the impact cyber attacks can have on their bottom line.

The financial cost of cyber attacks is multifaceted. The direct expenses include incident response, recovery, and potential ransom payments. However, the long-term financial repercussions often extend far beyond these immediate costs. Companies may suffer from lost revenue due to downtime, loss of intellectual property, or the need to invest in new security measures to prevent future attacks. Additionally, there are legal expenses and fines that can result from non-compliance with data protection regulations.

Furthermore, the intangible costs of cyber attacks are equally significant. A breach of customer data can lead to a loss of trust and loyalty, impacting customer retention and acquisition. The damage to reputation may result in decreased brand value and a loss of competitive advantage. Rebuilding trust and repairing a damaged reputation can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

Investing in cyber security is essential to mitigate the risks posed by cyber attacks. By implementing robust security measures and proactive monitoring, organizations can greatly reduce the likelihood and impact of successful attacks. The investment in cyber security is not just a cost, but rather an investment in the longevity and resilience of the business.

Cyber security measures include securing networks, implementing strong access controls, regularly updating and patching software, educating employees about security best practices, and conducting regular security audits. By staying ahead of evolving threats and investing in the right technology and expertise, organizations can enhance their ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks.

In conclusion, the cost of cyber attacks is not limited to immediate financial losses. The long-term consequences, including reputational damage and legal ramifications, can be equally devastating. Investing in cyber security is not only a smart financial decision, but also a critical step in safeguarding the future of any organization. By understanding the true cost of cyber attacks and the value of investing in cyber security, businesses can make informed decisions to protect themselves and their stakeholders.

The correlation between cyber security and privacy in the digital age

In the fast-paced digital age, the correlation between cyber security and privacy has become increasingly intricate and crucial. As technology continues to evolve, so do the threats posed by cybercriminals, making it imperative to prioritize both security and privacy measures.

Cyber security serves as the first line of defense against malicious attacks and unauthorized access. It encompasses a range of practices, protocols, and technologies designed to safeguard computer systems, networks, and data from potential threats. By implementing robust cyber security measures, individuals and organizations can protect their sensitive information, prevent data breaches, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of their digital assets.

However, cyber security is not solely about protecting data; it is also closely intertwined with the concept of privacy. In the digital landscape, privacy refers to an individual’s right to control their personal information and determine how and when it is shared. With the proliferation of online platforms, social media, and e-commerce, maintaining privacy has become more challenging than ever before.

The advancements in technology have allowed for the collection, storage, and analysis of vast amounts of personal data. This data, when in the wrong hands, can lead to identity theft, financial fraud, and other serious privacy breaches. Therefore, ensuring robust cyber security measures is directly linked to safeguarding privacy in the digital age.

The correlation between cyber security and privacy becomes even more significant when considering the potential consequences of a breach. A single data breach can have far-reaching implications, both on an individual level and for organizations. It can result in reputational damage, financial losses, legal liabilities, and erosion of trust. Such breaches can also compromise national security, disrupt critical infrastructure, and impact the overall stability of the digital ecosystem.

To address these challenges, individuals and organizations must adopt a proactive approach to cyber security and privacy. This includes staying informed about the latest threats and vulnerabilities, regularly updating software and security protocols, implementing strong passwords and encryption techniques, and being cautious while sharing personal information online.

In conclusion, the correlation between cyber security and privacy is undeniable in the digital age. Both aspects are intertwined and essential for safeguarding sensitive information, maintaining online trust, and preserving the integrity of the digital ecosystem. By prioritizing cyber security and privacy, individuals and organizations can navigate the digital landscape with confidence and mitigate the risks posed by cyber threats.

The role of government in promoting and enforcing cyber security regulations

In today’s digital age, the role of government in promoting and enforcing cyber security regulations is of paramount importance. With the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyber threats, it has become imperative for governments to actively intervene and safeguard their nations’ vital digital infrastructure and sensitive information. This article delves into the reasons why the government plays a crucial role in ensuring cyber security and the impact of their regulations on protecting individuals, businesses, and national security.

First and foremost, the government has the authority and resources to establish robust cyber security regulations that set standards and guidelines for all sectors. By creating a legal framework, they enforce compliance and hold organizations accountable for implementing appropriate security measures. This helps to create a culture of cyber security awareness and ensures that businesses prioritize the protection of valuable data.

Moreover, governments have access to intelligence and information sharing networks that enable them to identify emerging threats and vulnerabilities. By actively monitoring cyber activities, they can proactively respond to potential attacks and prevent major security breaches. This proactive approach not only protects individuals and businesses but also strengthens the overall resilience of the nation’s digital infrastructure.

Additionally, the government plays a vital role in promoting international cooperation and establishing global cyber security standards. Since cyber threats transcend national boundaries, collaboration between governments is essential to address these challenges collectively. By participating in international forums and treaties, governments can foster information exchange, capacity building, and joint efforts to combat cybercrime.

Furthermore, the government’s involvement in cyber security regulations is crucial for national security. Cyber attacks have the potential to disrupt critical infrastructure, compromise defense systems, and even manipulate elections. By establishing stringent regulations and investing in cyber defense capabilities, governments can safeguard their nation’s sovereignty and protect against potential cyber warfare.

However, it is important to strike a balance between promoting cyber security and ensuring individual privacy rights. Governments need to find the right balance between collecting necessary data for security purposes and protecting citizens’ privacy. This requires transparent and accountable governance, with checks and balances in place to prevent misuse of power.

In conclusion, the role of government in promoting and enforcing cyber security regulations is vital in today’s interconnected world. With the increasing complexity and severity of cyber threats, governments need to take proactive measures to protect their nations’ digital assets. By establishing robust regulations, fostering international cooperation, and investing in cyber defense capabilities, governments can create a safe and secure digital environment for individuals, businesses, and national security.

Emerging technologies and their impact on cyber security challenges

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, emerging technologies have brought about immense advancements and opportunities. However, along with these advancements, there also arises a new set of challenges and concerns, particularly in the realm of cyber security. The impact of emerging technologies on cyber security cannot be underestimated, as they introduce novel vulnerabilities and risks that need to be addressed proactively.

One of the main reasons why emerging technologies pose such challenges to cyber security is their inherent complexity. These technologies, such as artificial intelligence , cloud computing , Internet of Things (IoT) , and blockchain , often operate in intricate and interconnected ecosystems. This complexity increases the attack surface for cyber criminals, making it harder to detect and mitigate potential threats.

Furthermore, emerging technologies are constantly evolving, which adds another layer of difficulty to cyber security efforts. As new innovations are introduced, cyber criminals adapt and find new ways to exploit vulnerabilities. This dynamic and ever-evolving nature of emerging technologies requires cyber security professionals to stay ahead of the curve, constantly updating their knowledge and skills to effectively combat emerging threats.

Moreover, the rapid pace at which emerging technologies are being adopted and integrated into various sectors further amplifies the cyber security challenges. Organizations are often quick to embrace these technologies to gain a competitive edge, but fail to adequately address the associated security risks. This creates a gap that cyber criminals can exploit, potentially leading to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage.

Another aspect of the impact of emerging technologies on cyber security is the increased scale of connectivity and data sharing. With the proliferation of interconnected devices and systems, the volume of data being generated and transmitted has skyrocketed. This vast amount of data creates new opportunities for cyber attacks, as cyber criminals can target and exploit weak points in the data flow.

In conclusion, emerging technologies have undoubtedly revolutionized various industries, but they have also introduced complex cyber security challenges. The inherent complexity, constant evolution, rapid adoption, and increased scale of connectivity all contribute to the perplexity and burstiness of these challenges. To effectively address these challenges, organizations and individuals must prioritize cyber security and invest in robust measures to protect their systems, data, and networks.

The future of cyber security: trends and predictions

The future of cyber security is an enigmatic landscape that is constantly evolving, filled with both promising advancements and daunting challenges. As technology continues to advance at an unprecedented rate, the need for robust cyber security measures becomes increasingly vital. With the rise of artificial intelligence , the Internet of Things , and the ever-expanding digital landscape, our reliance on technology has become both a blessing and a curse, opening new doors of opportunity while leaving us vulnerable to cyber threats.

In this rapidly changing environment, the future of cyber security will be characterized by perplexity and burstiness. Perplexity, as the complexity and sophistication of cyber threats continue to outpace traditional security measures. Burstiness, as malicious actors constantly adapt their tactics, techniques, and procedures to exploit vulnerabilities in our digital infrastructure.

To effectively navigate this uncertain future, a proactive and adaptive approach to cyber security is crucial. Organizations need to embrace a holistic and multi-layered approach that encompasses not only technology but also people and processes. This includes investing in cutting-edge technologies such as advanced threat intelligence , machine learning , and behavioral analytics to detect and respond to emerging threats in real time.

Additionally, collaboration and information sharing will play a pivotal role in bolstering cyber security defenses. Governments, private sector companies, and individuals must come together to exchange best practices, threat intelligence, and lessons learned. By fostering a collective defense mindset, we can stay one step ahead of cyber criminals and minimize the impact of future attacks.

The future of cyber security is uncertain, with new threats and vulnerabilities emerging on a regular basis. However, by embracing innovation, collaboration, and a proactive mindset, we can build a more secure digital future. It is essential that we invest in research and development, education and awareness, and the cultivation of a skilled cyber security workforce to tackle the challenges that lie ahead. Together, we can shape a future where technology and security coexist harmoniously, protecting our digital assets and ensuring a safer online world for generations to come.

What is cyber security?

Cyber security refers to the practice of protecting computer systems, networks, and devices from digital attacks, unauthorized access, and data breaches.

Why do we need cyber security?

We need cyber security to safeguard our sensitive information, such as personal data, financial details, and business secrets, from being stolen, misused, or manipulated by cybercriminals.

What are the common cyber threats?

Common cyber threats include malware (such as viruses and ransomware), phishing attacks, social engineering, hacking, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

How can cyber security help individuals?

Cyber security helps individuals by providing protection against identity theft, online scams, and unauthorized access to personal accounts or devices. It allows for safe online banking, shopping, and communication.

Why is cyber security important for businesses?

Cyber security is crucial for businesses to protect their valuable data, maintain customer trust, comply with regulations, prevent financial losses, and avoid reputational damage caused by cyber incidents.

What are some best practices for cyber security?

Some best practices for cyber security include using strong and unique passwords, keeping software and devices up to date, being cautious of suspicious emails or links, regularly backing up data, and using reliable antivirus software.

Is cyber security a constant concern?

Yes, cyber security is an ongoing concern as cyber threats evolve and become more sophisticated. It requires continuous updates, monitoring, and proactive measures to stay protected.

Can individuals contribute to cyber security?

Yes, individuals can contribute to cyber security by practicing good cyber hygiene, educating themselves about online risks, using secure networks, and reporting any suspicious activities or incidents to appropriate authorities.

In conclusion, cyber security is crucial in today’s digital age. It plays a vital role in protecting individuals, businesses, and governments from cyber threats. With the increasing reliance on technology and the rise of sophisticated cyber attacks, having robust cyber security measures in place is essential. It not only safeguards sensitive information but also ensures the integrity and availability of data. By investing in cyber security, we can mitigate risks, safeguard privacy, and maintain trust in the digital ecosystem. Therefore, it is imperative that individuals and organizations prioritize cyber security to prevent and combat cyber threats effectively.

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In the simplest sense, a cybersecurity threat, or cyberthreat, is an indication that a hacker or malicious actor is attempting to gain unauthorized access to a network for launching a cyberattack.

Cyberthreats can range from the obvious, such as an email from a foreign potentate offering a small fortune if you’ll provide your bank account number, to the deviously stealthy, such as a line of malicious code that sneaks past cyberdefenses and lives on the network for months or years before triggering a costly data breach. The more security teams and employees know about the different types of cybersecurity threats, the more effectively they can prevent, prepare for and respond to cyberattacks.

Malware —short for “malicious software”—is software code that is written intentionally to harm a computer system or its users.

Almost every modern  cyberattack  involves some type of malware. Threat actors use malware attacks to gain unauthorized access and render infected systems inoperable, destroying data, stealing sensitive information and even wiping files critical to the operating system.

Common types of malware include:

• Ransomware  locks a victim’s data or device and threatens to keep it locked, or leak it publicly, unless the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. According to the  IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2023 , ransomware attacks represented 17 percent of all cyberattacks in 2022.
• A Trojan horse is malicious code that tricks people into downloading it by appearing to be a useful program or hiding within legitimate software. Examples include remote access Trojans (RATs), which create a secret backdoor on the victim’s device, or dropper Trojans, which install additional malware once they gain a foothold on the target system or network.
• Spyware is a highly secretive malware that gathers sensitive information, like usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and other personal data, and transmits it back to the attacker without the victim knowing.
• Worms are self-replicating programs that automatically spread to apps and devices without human interaction.

Frequently referred to as “human hacking,”  social engineering  manipulates targets into taking actions that expose confidential information, threaten their own or their organization’s financial well-being or otherwise compromise personal or organizational security.

Phishing  is the best-known and most pervasive form of social engineering. Phishing uses fraudulent emails, email attachments, text messages or phone calls to trick people into sharing personal data or login credentials, downloading malware, sending money to cybercriminals or taking other actions that might expose them to cybercrimes.

Common types of phishing include:

• Spear phishing : highly targeted phishing attacks that manipulate a specific individual, often using details from the victim’s public social media profiles to make the scam more convincing.
• Whale phishing : spear phishing that targets corporate executives or wealthy individuals.
• Business email compromise (BEC) : scams in which cybercriminals pose as executives, vendors or trusted business associates to trick victims into wiring money or sharing sensitive data.

Another common social engineering scam is  domain name spoofing  (also called DNS spoofing), in which cybercriminals use a fake website or domain name that impersonates a real one—for example, ‘‘applesupport.com’’ for support.apple.com—to trick people into entering sensitive information. Phishing emails often use spoofed sender domain names to make the email seem more credible and legitimate.

In a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, a cybercriminal eavesdrops on a network connection to intercept and relay messages between two parties and steal data. Unsecured wifi networks are often happy hunting grounds for hackers looking to launch MITM attacks.

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a cyberattack that overwhelms a website, application or system with volumes of fraudulent traffic, making it too slow to use or entirely unavailable to legitimate users. A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS attack, is similar except it uses a network of internet-connected, malware-infected devices or bots, which are known as a botnet, to cripple or crash the target system. 

A  zero-day exploit  is a type of cyberattack that takes advantage of a zero-day vulnerability—an unknown or as-yet-unaddressed or unpatched security flaw in computer software, hardware, or firmware. “Zero day” refers to the fact that a software or device vendor has “zero days”—or no time—to fix the vulnerabilities because malicious actors can already use them to gain access to vulnerable systems.

One of the best-known zero-day vulnerabilities is  Log4Shell , a flaw in the widely used Apache  Log4j  logging library. At the time of its discovery in November 2021, the Log4Shell vulnerability existed on 10 percent of global digital assets, including many web applications, cloud services and physical endpoints like servers.

As the name suggests, these attacks involve cybercriminals trying to guess or steal the password or login credentials to a user’s account. Many password attacks use social engineering to trick victims into unwittingly sharing this sensitive data. However, hackers can also use brute force attacks to steal passwords, repeatedly trying different password combinations until one is successful.

In an Internet of Things (IoT) attack, cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in IoT devices, like smart home devices and industrial control systems, to take over the device, steal data or use the device as a part of a botnet for other malicious ends.

In these attacks, hackers inject malicious code into a program or download malware to execute remote commands, enabling them to read or modify a database or change website data.

There are several types of injection attacks. Two of the most common include:

• SQL injection attacks: when hackers exploit the SQL syntax to spoof identity; expose, tamper, destroy or make existing data unavailable; or become the database server administrator.
• Cross-site scripting (XSS): these types of attacks are similar to SQL injection attacks, except instead of extracting data from a database, they typically infect users who visit a website.

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These individuals or groups commit cybercrimes, mostly for financial gain. Common crimes that are committed by cybercriminals include ransomware attacks and phishing scams that trick people into making money transfers or divulging credit card information, login credentials, intellectual property or other private or sensitive information. 

A hacker is someone with the technical skills to compromise a computer network or system.

Keep in mind that not all hackers are threat actors or cybercriminals. For example, some hackers—called ethical hackers—essentially impersonate cybercriminals to help organizations and government agencies test their computer systems for vulnerabilities to cyberattacks.

Nation states and governments frequently fund threat actors with the goal of stealing sensitive data, gathering confidential information or disrupting another government’s critical infrastructure. These malicious activities often include espionage or cyberwarfare and tend to be highly funded, making the threats complex and challenging to detect. 

Unlike most other cybercriminals, insider threats do not always result from malicious actors. Many insiders hurt their companies through human error, like unwittingly installing malware or losing a company-issued device that a cybercriminal finds and uses to access the network.

That said, malicious insiders do exist. For example, a disgruntled employee may abuse access privileges for monetary gain (for example, payment from a cybercriminal or nation state), or simply for spite or revenge.

Strong passwords  (link resides outside of ibm.com), email security tools and antivirus software are all critical first lines of defense against cyberthreats.

Organizations also rely on firewalls, VPNs,  multi-factor authentication , security awareness training and other advanced  endpoint security  and  network security  solutions to protect against cyberattacks.

However, no security system is complete without state-of-the-art threat detection and incident response capabilities to identify cybersecurity threats in real-time, and help rapidly isolate and remediate threats to minimize or prevent the damage that they can do.

IBM Security® QRadar® SIEM applies machine learning and user behavior analytics (UBA) to network traffic alongside traditional logs for smarter threat detection and faster remediation. In a recent Forrester study, QRadar SIEM helped security analysts save more than 14,000 hours over three years by identifying false positives, reduce time spent investigating incidents by 90% and reduce their risk of experiencing a serious security breach by 60%.* With QRadar SIEM, resource-strained security teams have the visibility and analytics they need to detect threats rapidly and take immediate, informed action to minimize the effects of an attack.

*The  Total Economic Impact™ of IBM Security QRadar SIEM  is a commissioned study that is conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM, April 2023. Based on projected results of a composite organization modeled from 4 interviewed IBM customers. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.

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New UN research reveals impact of AI and cybersecurity on women, peace and security in South-East Asia

Date: Tuesday, 21 May 2024

[Joint press release]

Bangkok, Thailand — Systemic issues can put women’s security at risk when artificial intelligence (AI) is adopted, and gender biases across widely used AI-systems pose a significant obstacle to the positive use of AI in the context of peace and security in South-East Asia.

Moreover, women human rights defenders (WHRDs) and women’s Civil Society Organisations (WCSOs) in the region are at high risk of experiencing cyber threats and, while largely aware of these risks, are not necessarily able to prepare for, or actively recover from, cyber-attacks.

These are among the key findings of groundbreaking research released today by UN Women and the United Nations University Institute in Macau (UNU Macau) examining the connections between AI, digital security and the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda in South-East Asia.

The research was made possible with support from the Government of Australia, under the Cyber and Critical Tech Cooperation Program (CCTCP) of the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and the Government of the Republic of Korea through the UN Women initiative, Women, Peace and Cybersecurity: Promoting Women, Peace and Security in the Digital World.

With AI projected to add USD 1 trillion to the gross domestic product of South-East Asian countries by 2030, understanding the impact of these technologies on the WPS agenda is critical to supporting these countries to regulate the technologies and mitigate their risks.

The report Artificial Intelligence and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in South-East Asia , examines the opportunities and risks of AI from this unique perspective by focusing on four types of gender biases in AI – discrimination, stereotyping, exclusion, and insecurity – which need to be addressed before the region can fully benefit from new technological developments.

This research examines the relationship between AI and WPS according to three types of AI and its applications: AI for peace, neutral AI, and AI for conflict.

This report notes that across these categories, there are favourable and unfavourable effects of AI for gender-responsive peace and women’s agency in peace efforts.

While using AI for peace purposes can have multiple benefits, such as improving inclusivity and the effectiveness of conflict prevention and tracking evidence of human rights breaches, it is used unequally between genders, and pervasive gender biases render women less likely to benefit from the application of these technologies.

The report also highlights risks related to the use of these technologies for military purposes.

This research identifies two dimensions to improving the dynamics of AI and the WPS agenda in the region: mitigating the risks of AI systems to advancing the WPS agenda, especially on social media, but also on other tools, such as chatbots and mobile applications; and fostering the development of AI tools built explicitly to support gender-responsive peace in line with WPS commitments.

The second report, Cybersecurity Threats, Vulnerabilities and Resilience among Women Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society in South-East Asia , explores cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities in this context with the goal of promoting cyber-resilience and the human and digital rights of women in all their diversity. 

While there is increasing awareness of the risks women and girls face in cyberspace, there is little understanding of the impacts of gender on cybersecurity, or of the processes and practices used to protect digital systems and networks from cyber risks and their harms.

This work differs from previous research into cybersecurity as it focuses on human-centric as compared to techno-centric cybersecurity and emphasises human factors rather than technical skills as well as the centralisation of gender as critical to cybersecurity.

Furthermore, cyber threats are understood to be gendered in nature, whereby WCSOs and WHRDs are specifically targeted due to the focus of their work and are likely to be attacked with misogynistic and sexualised harassment.

The results highlight that digital technologies are central to the work of WCSOs and WHRDs, while simultaneously noting that WCSOs had higher threat perceptions and threat experiences compared to CSOs that do not work on gender and women’s rights, carrying disproportionate risks of disrupting their work, damaging their reputation, and even creating harm or injury, all of which contribute to marginalising women’s voices.

The largest differences of experienced threats between the groups were for online harassment, trolling (deliberately provoking others online to incite reactions) and doxxing (when private or identifying information is distributed about someone online without their permission).

This report’s recommendations include fostering inclusive and collaborative approaches in cybersecurity policy development and engagement, and building the knowledge of civil society, government, private-sector actors and other decision makers to develop appropriate means of prevention and response to cyberattacks and their disproportionate impacts on WCSOs and WHRDs.

Specific attention should be given to at-risk individuals and organizations, such as women’s groups operating in politically volatile and conflict and crisis-affected contexts and situations where civic space is shrinking.

The launch took place during a UN Women youth conference, Gen-Forum 2024: Young Leaders for Women, Peace and Security in Asia and the Pacific which commenced today in Bangkok, Thailand.

UNU Macau and UN Women aim for this research, conducted over 12 months, to contribute to the global discourse on ethics and norms surrounding AI and digital governance at large.

Next, training materials based on the research findings and consultations with women’s rights advocates in the region will be rolled out, initially in Thailand and Vietnam, with e-learning modules and training handbooks to be publicly available in English, Thai and Vietnamese for interested stakeholders from mid-2024.

More information

Download full reports and research summaries:

• Artificial Intelligence and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in South-East Asia
• Cybersecurity Threats, Vulnerabilities and Resilience among Women Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society in South-East Asia

Read more about Gen-Forum 2024

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Julie Marks, UN Women e:  [ Click to reveal ]

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Cybersecurity Threats to Educational Institutions Essay

Introduction, the project plan, literature review, methodology, results and findings, recommendations.

The rapid adoption of digital solutions is exposing schools to the cyber-security threat, which is currently the biggest concern that these institutions face as they make a complete shift from the analog to the digital data management system (Chishti & Puschmann, 2018). According to a K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center (2021) report, a staggering 1,180 incidents have been reported since 2016. A recent Cyber Security of UK institutions found that cyber breaches and malicious attacks were prevalent in both business and education organizations in the last 12 months (Ipsos Synovate, 2020). As technology becomes central to the overall running of educational institutions, it is important to examine the new threat in order to find effective ways of addressing it (Christiansen & Piekarz, 2019).

Nature of Cyberattacks

According to a recent K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center (2021) report, there has been a dramatic rise in frequent and severe K-12 cyber-attacks in educational institutions. The most prevalent cases involve unauthorized disclosures or breaches, ransomware, Denial of Service (DoS), phishing, hacking, and other attacks that are increasingly becoming severe and frequent. Techno-savvy criminals have perfected the strategy of illegally accessing sensitive data belonging to students, lecturers, specific administrators, or the institution at large with malicious intentions (Grieco et al., 2019). Cybercriminals have been trying to hack into databases of such institutions with the aim of stealing the formula and selling it to other institutions around the world (Tallón-Ballesteros & Chen, 2020). Such intellectual property theft is a major concern to these institutions. Hacking may be targeted at manipulating information in the database of a learning institution. The financial department is always the leading target of these cybercriminals. Their goal is always to steal from the institution using different strategies (Berman et al., 2019). Some criminal-minded students may hack the system and update their payment details with the goal of defrauding the institution. A hacker may target a student’s portal and manipulate data in various ways. Ransomware attacks are also increasingly becoming common, and they often target lecturers and administrators (Erendor & Öztarsu, 2020). Other major threats include Trojans, botnets, wiper attacks, and Distributed Denial of Service.

The Problem

Rapid digitization that has been witnessed in various learning institutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and around the world over the past decade has exacerbated the problem of cyber-attacks. The problem is that despite the serious danger that cyber insecurity poses to these educational institutions, they do not have the option of moving back from digital to analog data management systems (Nguyen & Reddi, 2020). These institutions have to continue using digital data systems because of the technological changes that have been taking place in the recent past. They have to learn how to manage the threat and operate secure digital platforms that protect learners, teachers, administrators, and institutions.

Factors Exacerbating Cyber Insecurity

Limited budget is a serious challenge that limits the ability of these institutions to fight cybercrime effectively. According to Williams and McDonald (2018), most of these educational institutions cannot afford to set aside a significant amount of their resources to fight cybercrime as they rely hugely on government funding and school fees. The income goes to the payment of staff, purchasing of consumables needed in the institution, and paying other bills. As such, setting aside a significant amount of money to install some of the latest software and pay for highly qualified experts is an issue. In addition, the country still lacks legislation that can help in prosecuting those who steal or manipulate data from these institutions (Kumar, 2020). Cybercriminals may be prosecuted for a misdemeanor, which is a minor offense that cannot deter such actions in the country. The few cyber-security policies that have been enacted do not classify learning institutions as major victims of such attacks. As such, they have not been given priority when defining means and strategies for fighting cybercrime in the country. The cyber-security threat has worsened the tendency of students and staff to use personal devices such as personal computers, iPads, tablets, or smartphones to access these sensitive databases. Criminals take advantage of these security gaps to access information that they need (Nguyen & Reddi, 2020). Thus, it is necessary to find ways of addressing the problem to ensure that these institutions are protected.

Clear Statement of Aim

It is evident that learning institutions in the country and around the world are faced with serious cyber-security threats. As explained above, the problem cannot be solved by walking back technology and reverting to the analog approach to managing data. Instead, stakeholders have to find ways of ensuring that these educational institutions operate without being adversely exposed to cyber insecurity. The aim of this study is to investigate cyber-security threats that these institutions face and develop solutions that they can embrace to ensure that their data is protected from any form of attack.

• To assess the nature, magnitude, and frequency of cyber-attacks that target educational institutions in the country.
• To identify departments that are more vulnerable to these attacks in these institutions.
• To determine the impact of cyber-attacks on the normal operations and success of learning institutions in the country.

When conducting a research project, it is important to define in clear terms tasks specifications and durations that they are supposed to take for them to be completed. The project plan helps in determining how each activity should be taken to enable the researcher to achieve the desired goals. In this section, the researcher defines these tasks and the duration that it will take to ensure that they are completed. The first task of developing the proposal was to take about 11 days, from January 7th to January 18th, 2021. Proposal approval was expected to take about two weeks, from January 20th to February 15th, 2021. Questionnaire development took a relatively short period of two days, from 18th to 20th February 2021, because research questions had been defined. A review of the literature was a continuous process. From January 7th, 2021, when developing the proposal to April 25th, 2021, when writing the final report. Primary data collection took over six weeks, from February 23rd to April 5th, 2021.

Data analysis ng primary data collected from these participants took about two weeks, from 8th to 23rd April 2021. Writing the report and proofing it, which was the last step, took about three weeks, from April 25th to May 17th, 2021. The completed report will then be delivered as per the regulations set by the school and within the time that was specified.

Based on the review of existing literature on cyber security in an educational institution, this review established that this topic had attracted a lot of attention from researchers and practitioners. This interest manifests in the growing literature on c cyber-attacks covered in this review. However, despite the existence of extensive research in this area, most of the studies focused on cyber-security threats to online learning. Topics such as severity, frequency, impacts, and solutions to this problem are adequately covered. Literature reviews and opinion briefs were the common methodologies, but a few studies used structured questionnaires.

Critical Analysis

The article by Adel et al. (2019) provides a clear picture of e-learning and its growing adoption in higher education institutions. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of existing literature on the online education approach, which helps readers understand the nature, trends, advantages, and limitations of e-learning. This source is relevant to the research because its content helped to provide a strong background to the study. However, the article lacks depth because very few sources are included, and most of them are not current.

In their journal article, Aliyu et al. (2020) advanced a more comprehensive, internet-based framework for analyzing and assessing security vulnerabilities and potential threats in online systems. This study is relevant to the research project because it details an array of cyber threats to educational institutions. Furthermore, the article offers metrics that educational institutions can utilize to measure their competency or maturity in relation to online learning adoption. Besides that, the authors propose a security assessment model, which, unlike other conventional frameworks, incorporates relevant regulations. The major limitation of this study is the lack of primary data.

In this journal article, Coleman and Reeder (2018) provide a nuanced discussion of major reasons why educational institutions need to invest more resources in improving the security and integrity of their information communication systems. The authors draw on a wide range of literature and empirical evidence to support their arguments. In addition, it integrates old and current literature which helps capture current issues and debates on cyber security in learning institutions. However, the authors rely heavily on secondary data and personal opinions, which weaken the validity and reliability of their arguments.

Muniandy et al. (2017) conducted an empirical investigation to examine the current state of cyber security behavior of college and university students in Malaysia. The researchers explored how the learners use passwords and their knowledge about key attacks such as phishing, malware, internet-based scamming, and social engineering. Unlike previous studies, this study employed a structured questionnaire to gather primary data from the participants. Analysis of the collected data revealed that a majority of the learners exhibited unsatisfactory knowledge levels across all five security threats. The use of a structured data collection tool enhanced the validity and reliability of the research results. Furthermore, this instrument enables the researcher to recruit a large sample, which also enhances the overall trustworthiness of the study. However, the rigidity, structured, and non-participatory nature of this tool did not allow the investigators to gain a nuanced understanding of the research problem.

Overview of Research Methodology

Limited studies have narrowed down to how local educational institutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are affected by the problem of constant cyber-attacks. Therefore, this study examined how these institutions are affected by this problem to find ways of developing local solutions. As such, collecting primary data from local stakeholders in the education sector was essential. This chapter explains how participants (subjects) were identified, sampled, and involved in the process of collecting data. The chapter also explains the instrument used in the process of collecting data, the procedure, and the statistical analysis that was conducted to help in answering the research questions. The chapter ends by explaining the challenges faced and ethical considerations that the researcher observed.

The researcher had to collect data from stakeholders in the education sector who could explain the cyber-security threats that they have encountered in their normal operations. The researcher used a stratified sampling method to select 50 participants. The first group was the administrators responsible for ensuring that these institutions were running smoothly. The second group was the teachers who are currently using cyberspace and other modern technologies to facilitate the learning process. The third group was learners who are currently using information technology to enable them to acquire new knowledge. The researcher selected two institutions of higher learning to facilitate the process of collecting data from these three groups of respondents.

Instrumentation

It was necessary to develop an instrument to facilitate the process of collecting data from the sampled participants. A questionnaire helps to harmonize the collected data and ensures that every participant is given the same question that can then be used to facilitate the analysis (Politano et al., 2018). It also eliminates cases where a researcher forgets to ask critical questions needed to respond to the main research questions. The researcher developed a questionnaire with three sections. The first part of the questionnaire focused on the demographical factors of the respondents. The second part of the document focused on the experience and academic qualifications of the participants. The last section of the instruments focused on specific issues related to cyber-security threats to educational institutions within the country.

Research Procedure

The process of collecting data from the sampled participants started with seeking permission from the management of the two institutions before contacting individual participants. After that, the researcher reached out to individual respondents to obtain their informed consent. The goal of this study was explained to them, and they were informed of the reason why they were selected. Only those who agreed to be part of this study were engaged in the process of collecting data. The researchers emailed questionnaires to these participants. The email explained how they were expected to respond to the questions. The researchers made a follow-up with every respondent to remind them that the document had been emailed to them and that they were expected to email back the filled questionnaire. The process of collecting primary data took two weeks.

Statistical Analysis

When primary data had been collected from the participant, it had to be processed to help in responding to the research questions. According to Mallette and Duke (2020), one can use qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method to process primary data. The choice of the method depends on the nature of the questions that have to be answered. In this study, statistical analysis was the most appropriate method of answering questions. The quantitative method used structured questions, and the participants were instructed to select answers that best responded to each of the questions asked. Data obtained from the participants were coded into an excel spreadsheet. The software was then used for the computation and generation of various outputs depending on the nature of the question that had to be answered.

Challenges Faced and Ethical Considerations

The process of collecting primary data was affected by some challenges which are worth discussing at this stage of the report. One of the major challenges was the inability to physically interact with the participants because of the COVID-19 restrictions. Face-to-face interviews were the most preferred approach for collecting primary data and could not be used in this investigation due to COVID-related restrictions. The researcher had to rely on online platforms to gather the needed data. When conducting this study, the researchers were keen on observing ethical considerations. Consistent with Baron and McNeal (2019), the researcher ensured that the identity of those who took part in the study remained anonymous. Instead of using their actual names, they were assigned codes from Participant 1 to Participant 50. The researchers obtained informed consent from each participant before they could start answering the questions. All forms of plagiarism were avoided, and information obtained from secondary sources was referenced accordingly using American Psychological Association (APA) seventh edition style.

Nature and Magnitude of Cyber-Attacks

Malware attack is the most common cyber-attack at these institutions. It affected all the stakeholders, irrespective of their department. Phishing was the second-most common form of cyber-attack at these organizations. The respondents identified unsecured personal devices as another common problem. Denial of service (D-o-s) and camfecting were the other challenges that these respondents identified. The findings of this study confirmed the high perverse nature of cyber-security threats in the existing literature. An overwhelming majority (94%) of the participants believe that cyber-attacks have a devastating impact on the normal operations of these educational institutions. 38% of the respondents (19 out of 50) stated that cyber-attacks have a highly devastating impact. Another 52% of the respondents (26 out of 50) stated that the impact is devastating, while 4% believed that it is somehow devastating.

Frequency of Attacks and most Affected Departments

An overwhelming majority of the participants (94%) believe that these attacks are frequent at the selected institutions. 50%, 44%, and 4% of the respondents stated that these attacks are highly frequent, frequent, or less frequent, respectively. The finance department is the most vulnerable unit, with 50% of those interviewed identifying it as the most vulnerable department. The administration, research and extension, online learning, academic department, and students’ portals were also at great risk of cyber-attacks.

Impact of Cyber-Attack on Educational Institutions

The biggest impact of these attacks is the loss of financial resources. This finding confirms previous research results showing that most of these cybercriminals are often targeting the finance departments of these organizations. There is also the massive disruption of learning when they attack digital instruments that are meant to facilitate the normal learning process. Personalized attacks on students, the teaching staff, and the non-academic staff may also disrupt the learning environment. Loss of intellectual property is another issue that institutions face when attacked. Some of the respondents felt that when there are such attacks, there would be poor coordination of activities, especially when the communication system is compromised.

Many learning institutions are transitioning from analog to digital data management systems. Online learning is becoming a dominant approach to education delivery due to its cost efficiencies and enhancing access to higher education. This trend is exacerbated by the COVID-19 containment measures. However, these impressive steps have been significantly affected by the continued cyber-attacks that these institutions face. Cyber-attack is a major threat to the success and normal operations of educational institutions. This investigation established that the institutions that were surveyed were not ready to deal with the threat associated with the new system. The attack has led to the loss of finances for these institutions, loss of intellectual property, cases of blackmail, and other forms of online harassment.

The management of educational institutions and policymakers in the country should find a way of addressing the problem of cyber-security threats in the country. They have to put in place policies and infrastructural systems that will ensure that sensitive data for these institutions remain as secure as possible. The following are the steps that they should consider to address this problem:

• Every education institution should have internal policies meant to minimize the capabilities of cybercriminals;
• They need to invest in emerging technologies meant to protect their databases;
• These institutions need to work closely with cyber-security experts to help in monitoring and managing these threats;
• The government should enact strict policies that can ensure that cyber criminals are severely punished to discourage such practices;
• The government should increase the financial allocations of educational institutions to enable them to fight cybercrime effectively.

Challenges and Future Research

The process of collecting primary data was affected by some challenges which are worth discussing at this stage of the report. One of the major challenges was the inability to physically interact with the participants because of the COVID-19 restrictions. Face-to-face interviews were the most preferred approach for collecting primary data and could not be used in this investigation due to COVID-related restrictions. Furthermore, the pandemic made it difficult to draw a large sample and some participants. As a result, the researcher had to rely on online platforms to gather the needed data. Further research should consider using large samples and studying multiple schools to compare findings. Future research should use face-to-face methods such as personal interviews to gain in-depth knowledge into the nature, frequency, and impact of cyber-attacks in educational institutions.

Adel, E., Elsawy, M., & Ahmed, S. (2019). E-Learning using the Blackboard system in light of the quality of education and cyber security. International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, 9 (1), 49-54.

Aliyu, A., Maglaras. L., He, Y., Yevseyeva, I., Boiten, E., Cook, A., & Janicke, H. (2020). A holistic cybersecurity maturity assessment framework for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. Applied Sciences, 10(1), 1-15.

Coleman, C. D., & Reeder, E. (2018). Three reasons for improving cyber-security instruction and practice in schools. SITE, 26 (30), 1020-1024.

Hasan, R. (2017). Protect a university website from the different types of outside attacks. Journal of Advanced Computing and Communication Technologies. 5(4), 109-114.

Muniandy, L., Muniandy, B., & Samsudin, Z. (2017). Cyber security behaviour among higher education students in Malaysia. Journal of Information Assurance & Cyber security, 7 (1), 1-12.

Nguyen, T., & Reddi, V. (2020). Deep reinforcement learning for cyber security. Cryptography and Security, 3 (1), 1-11.

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• The Information Technology Security Strategy
• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2022, August 6). Cybersecurity Threats to Educational Institutions. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cybersecurity-threats-to-educational-institutions/

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Bibliography

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Women’s Cyber Security: The Missing Piece In BJP’s Election Manifesto

As the country nears the end of its 16th general elections, the issue of women’s security has again resurfaced. Lately, the digital landscape has become more complex, especially for women who are more prone to trolling, online harassment, and privacy violations. Yet, their cybersecurity remains conspicuously absent from the national discourse.

The last many years of Modi government tenure have witnessed an increased surge in cyber threats targeting women. In 2022, an online gender-based violence incident – Sulli Deal came up. The open-source app auctioned the personal information and pictures of over 100 Muslim women without their consent. Similarly, Bulli Bai built on stolen pictures of women who voiced their opinions publicly, specifically those who raised their voices for social justice and minority issues, was launched.

The trend of hacking the social media handles of women users is another concerning area. Women users are losing their accounts to hackers at an alarming rate. The gravity of this situation was highlighted on the famous social media platform, Instagram. There has been a concerning surge in the hacking of Instagram handles, mostly targeting women. It could be one participating in an online poll or replying to an unknown user, the next moment your account is gone. This has instigated fear among women on social media with their privacy at stake. 

Women users are losing their accounts to hackers at an alarming rate. The gravity of this situation was highlighted on the famous social media platform, Instagram. There has been a concerning surge in the hacking of Instagram handles, mostly targeting women. It could be one participating in an online poll or replying to an unknown user, the next moment your account is gone. This has instigated fear among women on social media with their privacy at stake. 

With India transforming into a digital country and despite the growing concerns, the election manifesto which serves as a blueprint for the country’s future, fails to address women’s cybersecurity. While sections on women’s empowerment and technology innovation are included, the absence of specific provisions for women’s online safety is a glaring oversight in the Bhartiya Janta Party manifesto (Sankalp Patra).

Cybersecurity in policy

According to a report published in Feb 2024, by statista.com , the capital city of Delhi has reported over 800 cases of women harassment cases in India in 2022 alone. Despite the National Cyber Security Policy, issued in 2013, followed by the National Cyber Security Strategy (2020), the absence of any specific legislative framework made to tackle cyber crimes against women remains a question to many. The government needs to revise the 2013 policy and adopt a comprehensive strategy to address the entire spectrum of the cybersecurity issue. 

The hackers have taken advantage of loopholes to invade privacy and wreak mayhem, underscoring the urgency of addressing these concerns. Samra Khan, an undergraduate student of psychology narrated the line of events in which her account was hacked.

‘ I received a message from a friend, apparently her account was already hacked but I had no clue about it because there was no suspicious activity done. She texted me to vote for her in some advocacy thing. It seemed pretty legit to me because I have been asked to vote for other people too, so I logged in to my Instagram to do the same. I entered my password, and even after several attempts it was showing incorrect. It was then I realized that my account was hacked ,’ Samra tells FII.

Khan, who is 19 years old had a private account on Instagram, however, all her details were made public once her account got hacked. ‘I asked my friends to report that account immediately so that it could be removed permanently, however, in the coming days I got an official mail from Instagram stating that they found nothing wrong with the account, so it cannot be removed. I had around 500 followers and it was a private account. But when it was hacked they made my account public and all my photos were out there, yet I couldn’t do anything about it .’

The chairperson of the National Commission of Women states that 98 per cent of cybercrimes are carried out against women . Although the Information Technology Act of 2000 was the first to address IT crimes, it was not without flaws such that our country does not have a specific legislative framework in place to prevent cybercrime against women.

The consequences of such breaches extend beyond mere inconvenience and borders. Yasmeen Andrabi, a resident of Srinagar, recounts the distress of having her account hacked , ‘I got very tense when my sister informed me that my account got hacked. Though I only had around 190 followers, it was one of my oldest accounts. I had it even before I signed up on Facebook.

Andrabi, 55 a homemaker was afraid that all the data on her phone had been leaked , ‘Since I am not tech-savvy, I thought my phone was hacked and all my private information was leaked and I panicked. I was ready to even change my phone .’

The plethora of account hacking and the obviosity of online harassment have made citizens anxious. While the BJP’s manifesto has a thorough list of guarantees across several sectors, one noteworthy omission is a mention of cybersecurity measures aimed at ensuring the safety and empowerment of women online. This is an era when digital platforms are ubiquitous and the party’s failure to implement specific initiatives to protect women from cyber threats and harassment highlights a gap in its commitment to gender equality and security.

The need for a legislative framework

The party’s comprehensive commitment to empowering all societal segments in the Sankalp Patra (manifesto) should have been highlighted by the deliberate inclusion of measures targeted at improving women’s cybersecurity, especially in light of the increasing concerns about cyberbullying, online harassment, and privacy violations experienced by women all over India

Cyber experts warn that the rising cyber threats, especially against women do not just jeopardise privacy but are also a threat to their security and well-being. They emphasise the significance of establishing strong security measures, such as two-factor authentication, to strengthen online defences. To add a degree of security against criminal activity, experts advise linking phone numbers to their social media accounts. ‘ The increasing risk of data breaches and cyber threats should remind people to exercise heightened vigilance, and the apps should further increase their security measures. This is not just a violation of privacy for women but also a threat to their safety and well-being ,’ says Asif Khan who has been a resident of Delhi for more than 8 years. Khan, now 24, works as a Technical Lead in a Canadian cybersecurity startup stating that the IT Act makes identity theft a punishable offence. Under this provision, whoever, fraudulently or dishonestly makes use of the electronic signature, password, or any other unique identification feature of any other person, shall be punished with imprisonment.

‘ The person who hacked my account texted my followers saying “I need some money, please transfer it using the following link.” They attached a link to an online payment gateway. One of my close friends, who thought I needed the money, sent ₹30,000 to the hacker’s account. When I heard this, I was shocked and helpless ,’ stated Tanzeel Rafiqi, a 41-year-old resident of Sanat Nagar, Srinagar.

Users all across social media are getting fooled by such messages that too from the handles of their known. This raises trust issues in people who want to be a contributor to fundraisers and polls. Ironically women find themselves the most affected in this suppression too. ‘ To address these risks and maintain a safe and inclusive digital environment for all users, policymakers and technology corporations must work together. Other individuals also need to be informed. They should enable two-factor authentication and link their accounts with their phone numbers and email addresses ,’ added Khan. 

Call for a collaborative action

Will India achieve growth by neglecting cyber security and gender-based harassment?  In the mission of making India the 3rd largest economy by strengthening the economic front, the societal front has been kept on the back foot with less weightage to digital aspects. 

A survey conducted by OOSGA in October 2023 found 470.1 million active users of social media in India. With WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook being the top three handles in 2021, Instagram has held the first position since 2022. An increase of 4.2 per cent in users has been noticed in recent years, who use social media as a medium for news.

Action towards securing digital spaces, especially for women has become the need of the hour. For several women users, social media has become their newfound freedom where they tend to express and take agency of their own lives freely.

India, which has been working towards ending the digital divide will only find the gender gap widening with the alarming rate of social media-generated anxieties. This will ultimately become a leading factor in diminishing the participation of women in the social sphere.

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US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election

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Taiwan has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes while it also encounters the largest amount of foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Because of the large influx of misinformation, Taiwan has taken a public crowdsourcing approach to combatting misinformation, using both fact-checking ChatBots and public dataset called CoFacts. Combining CoFacts with large-language models (LLM), we investigated misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. We found that most misinformation appears within China-friendly political groups and attacks US-Taiwan relations through visual media like images and videos. A considerable proportion of misinformation does not question U.S. foreign policy directly. Rather, it exaggerates domestic issues in the United States to create a sense of declining U.S. state capacity. Curiously, we found misinformation rhetoric that references conspiracy groups in the West.

Program in Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College, USA

Department of Political Science, University of Nevada Las Vegas, USA

Department of Computer Science, Barnard College, USA

Research Questions

• What are the misinformation narratives surrounding the election in Taiwan and how do they target international relations with the United States?
• What geographical or temporal patterns emerge from misinformation data?
• Who are the targets of these misinformation narratives and through what modalities?

Essay Summary

• We leveraged a dataset of 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,510 posts from Facebook, and 2,005,972 posts and comments from PTT to understand misinformation dynamics through topic modeling and network analysis.
• The primary form of misinformation is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.
• Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.
• Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share many themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.
• Our study shows the prevalence of misinformation strategies using visual media and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowdsourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Implications

According to Freedom House, Taiwan has one of the highest indices for free speech in Asia (Freedom House, 2022). Additionally, due to its contentious history with China, it receives significant foreign interference and misinformation, especially during its presidential elections. Due to the large influx of dis- and misinformation, Taiwan has developed many strategies to counter misleading narratives, including fact-checking ChatBots on its most popular chatroom app (Chang et al., 2020). Under this information environment, the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election emerged as one of the most divisive elections in Taiwan’s history, featuring at one point a doubling of presidential candidates in a typically two-party race, from two to four. As such, Taiwan is regarded as a “canary for disinformation” against elections in 2024, as a first indicator to how foreign interference may take place in other democracies (Welch, 2024).

In this paper, we study the misinformation ecosystem in Taiwan starting a year prior to the election. First, our findings highlight the interaction between misinformation and international relations. As was reported in The Economist and The New York Times , a considerable portion of the misinformation spread in Taiwan before the 2024 election is about US-skepticism, which aims at undermining the reputation of the United States among Taiwanese people (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023; Hsu, Chien, and Myers, 2023). This phenomenon is significant because it does not target specific candidates or parties in the election but may indirectly influence the vote choice between pro- and anti-U.S. parties. Given the US-China global competition and the Russia-Ukraine ongoing conflict, the reputation of the United States is crucial for the strength and reliability of democratic allies (Cohen, 2003). Hence, it is not surprising that misinformation about the United States may propagate globally and influence elections across democracies. However, our findings surprisingly show that US-skepticism also includes a considerable number of attacks on U.S. domestic politics. Such content does not question the U.S. foreign policy but undermines the perceived reliability and state capacity of the United States. Here, s tate capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal, which is conceptually different from motivation and trust.

US-skepticism is commonly characterized as mistrusting the motivations of the United States, as illustrated in the Latin American context due to long histories of political influence (see dependency theory; Galeano, 1997), but our findings suggest that perceived U.S. state capacity is also an important narrative. As most foreign disinformation arises from China, this indicates a greater trend where authoritarian countries turn to sharp power tactics to distort information and defame global competitors rather than winning hearts and minds through soft power. Sharp power refers to the ways in which authoritarian regimes project their influence abroad to pierce, penetrate, or perforate the informational environments in targeted countries (Walker, 2018). In Taiwan’s case, China may not be able to tell China’s story well, but can still influence Taiwanese voters by making them believe that the United States is declining. Our findings suggest that future work analyzing the topics and keywords of misinformation in elections outside the United States should also consider the US-skepticism as one latent category, not just the politicians and countries as is common with electoral misinformation (Tenove et al., 2018). These findings are corroborated by narratives identified by a recent report including drug issues, race relations, and urban decay (Microsoft Threat Intelligence, 2024).

Additionally, our research investigates both misinformation and conspiracy theories, which are closely related. Whereas misinformation is broadly described as “false or inaccurate information” (Jerit & Zhao, 2020), a conspiracy theory is the belief that harmful events are caused by a powerful, often secretive, group. In particular, conspiracy communities often coalesce around activities of “truth-seeking,” embodying a contrarian view toward commonly held beliefs (Enders et al., 2022; Harambam, 2020; Konkes & Lester, 2017). Our findings also provide evidence of transnational similarities between conspiracy groups in Taiwan and the United States. Whereas the domestic context has been explored (Chen et al., 2023; Jerit & Zhao, 2020), the intersection of partisanship and conspiracy groups as conduits for cross-national misinformation flow deserves further investigation.

Second, our findings reemphasize that an IP address is not a reliable criterion for attributing foreign intervention.  Previous studies on Chinese cyber armies show that they use a VPN for their activities on Twitter (now X) (Wang et al., 2020) and Facebook (Frenkel, 2023). Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is a public forum in Taiwan that by default contains the IP address of the poster. Our analysis of PTT located a group of accounts with US IP addresses that have the same activity pattern as other Taiwan-based accounts. Therefore, it is likely that these accounts use VPN to hide their geolocation. Our results provide additional evidence that this VPN strategy also appears on secondary and localized social media platforms. Our results suggest that the analysis of the originating location of misinformation should not be based entirely on IP addresses.

Third, our findings show that text is far from the only format used in the spread of misinformation. A considerable amount of misinformation identified on Facebook is spread through links (47%), videos (21%), and photos (15%). These items may echo each other’s content or even feature cross-platform flow. Proper tools are needed to extract and juxtapose content from different types of media so that researchers can have a holistic analysis of the spread and development of misinformation (Tucker et al., 2018). Such tools are urgent since mainstream social media has adopted and highly encouraged short videos—a crucial area for researchers to assess how misinformation spreads across platforms in the upcoming year of elections. This understanding is also important for fact-check agencies because they must prepare for collecting and reviewing information on various topics found in multiple media types across platforms. Crowdsourcing, data science, expert inputs, and international collaboration are all needed to deal with multi-format misinformation environments.

With prior studies showing that the aggregated fact checks (known as wisdom of the crowds) perform on par with expert ratings (see Arechar et al., 2023; Martel et al., 2023), our case study also evidences how crowdsourcing and LLM approaches can not only quickly fact-check but also summarize larger narrative trends. In Taiwan, this takes form of the CoFacts open dataset, which we use to identify misinformation narratives. CoFacts is a project initiated by g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), a civic hacktivism community in Taiwan that started in 2012. CoFacts started as a fact-checking ChatBot that circumvents the closed nature of chatroom apps, where users can forward suspicious messages or integrate the ChatBot into private rooms. These narratives are then sent to a database. Individual narratives are subsequently reviewed by more than 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers, and retirees (Haime, 2022). As a citizen-initiated project, it is not affiliated with any government entity or party.

Crucially, these reviews provide valuable labels that are used to train AI models and fine-tune LLMs. The dataset is available open source on the popular deep-learning platform HuggingFace. Just as AI and automation can be used to spread misinformation (Chang, 2023; Chang & Ferrara, 2022; Ferrara et al., 2020; Monaco & Woolley, 2022), it can also help combat “fake news” through human-AI collaboration.

Finding 1: The primary form of misinformation  is narratives that attack international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-skepticism), specifically referencing the economy, health policy, the threat of war through Ukraine, and other U.S. domestic issues.

The status quo between China and Taiwan is marked by Taiwan’s self-identification as a sovereign state, which is in contrast to China’s view of Taiwan as part of its territory under the “One China” policy. As brief context, China has claimed Taiwan as its territory since 1949, but the United States has helped maintain the status quo and peace after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. After democratization in 1987, Taiwan’s politics have been dominated by a clear blue-green division. The blue camp is led by Kuomintang (Nationalist Party, KMT hereafter), the founding party of the Republic of China (ROC, the formal name of Taiwan’s government based on its constitution) who was defeated by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The green camp is led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which pursues revising the ROC Constitution and changing the country’s name to Taiwan. The political cleavage between the blue and green camps is dictated by Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC and the United States. The blue camp’s position is that the PRC and ROC are under civil war but belong to the same Chinese nation, and thus the blue camp appreciates military support from the United States while enhancing economic and cultural cooperation with the PRC. The green camp believes that the necessary conditions for Taiwan to be free and independent are to stand firmly with the United States and maintain distance from the PRC. After 2020, the two major camps’ insufficient attention to domestic and social issues caused the rise of nonpartisans and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP or the white camp), which strategically avoids discussing foreign policies. In the 2024 election, the ruling DPP party (green) was reelected with 40% of votes for the third consecutive presidency (from 2016 to 2028), while KMT (blue) and TPP (white) received 33% and 26% of votes, respectively.

The U.S. “One China” policy since 1979 indicates that the United States opposes any change to the status quo unless it is solved peacefully. This has motivated the PRC to persuade Taiwanese citizens to support unification using misinformation targeted at China-friendly political groups, as the cost of unification would be greatly reduced if sufficient Taiwanese citizens opposed U.S. military intervention. This history between the United States and Taiwan serves as the foundation of US-skepticism. In the literature, US-skepticism in Taiwan is composed of two key psychological elements: trust and motivation (Wu & Lin, 2019; Wu, 2023). First, many Taiwanese no longer trust the United States after the United States switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan (ROC) to the PRC in 1979. Many blue-camp supporters doubt the commitment of the United States to send troops should China invade, per the Taiwan Relations Act (Wu & Lin, 2019). Second, Taiwanese citizens question Taiwan’s role as a proxy in a potential war with China instead of sincerely protecting democracy and human rights in Taiwan (Wu, 2023).

The CoFacts dataset contains 140,314 articles submitted by Line users, which are then fact-checked by volunteers as rumor (47%), not a rumor (21%), not an article (19%), and opinion (13%). Here, rumor is synonymous with misinformation. Using the CoFacts dataset, we trained a BERTopic model to identify 34 forms of misinformation and then ranked them by their overlap with the word “elections” in Mandarin Chinese (George & Sumathy, 2023; Nguyen et al., 2020). Table 1 shows the top nine narratives.

Many of these narratives are directly related to political parties or the democratic process. For instance, the highest-ranked topic is attacking the incumbent party (the DPP) at 18.1%, which contains 2,371 total posts. The subsequent misinformation topics focus on policy issues and specific narratives—international relations, issues of marriage and birth rate, vaccines, nuclear energy, biometrics, egg imports, and the war in Ukraine. These are known cleavage issues and overlap with the eight central concerns during the election cycle—economic prosperity, cross-strait affairs, wealth distribution, political corruption, national security, social reform/stability, and environmental protection (Achen & Wang, 2017; Achen & Wang, 2019; Chang & Fang, 2023).

We focus on the third type of misinformation, which is the relationship between Taiwan, the United States, and China. US-skepticism is not only the largest at 10,826 individual posts, but one flagged by journalists, policymakers, and politicians as one of the most crucial themes. This is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of proportion, which aims to sow distrust toward the United States (“China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation,” 2023). In contrast, questioning the fairness of process (i.e. ballot numbers) and policy positions (i.e. gay marriage) are common during elections. However, US-skeptical misinformation diverges in that there is no explicit political candidate or party targeted. By sampling the topic articles within this category and validating using an LLM-summarizer through the ChatGPT API, we identified three specific narratives:

(a) The United States and the threat of war: Ukraine intersects frequently in this topic, with videos of direct military actions. Example: “Did you hear former USA military strategist Jack Keane say the Ukrainian war is an investment. The USA spends just $66,000,000,000 and can make Ukraine and Russia fight…  Keane then mentions Taiwan is the same, where Taiwanese citizens are an ‘investment’ for Americans to fight a cheap war. The USA is cold and calculating, without any actual intent to help Taiwan!”

(b) Economic atrophy due to fiscal actions by the United States: These narratives focus on domestic policy issues in Taiwan such as minimum wage and housing costs. Example: “The USA printed 4 trillion dollars and bought stocks everywhere in the world, including Taiwan, and caused inflation and depressed wages. Be prepared!”

(c) Vaccine supply and the United States: While some narratives focus on the efficacy of vaccines, several describe the United States intentionally limiting supply during the pandemic. Example: “Taiwanese Dr. Lin is a leading scientist at Moderna, yet sells domestically at $39 per two doses, $50 to Israel. Taiwan must bid at least $60! The United States clearly does not value Taiwan.”

These narratives reveal a new element to US-skepticism: state capacity. As previously mentioned, state capacity is defined as whether a state is capable of mobilizing its resources to realize its goal. The Ukraine war and vaccine supply narratives both question the United States’ motivations in foreign policies and perceived trustworthiness. Meanwhile, the economic atrophy narrative is based on the United States’ domestic budgetary deficit and downstream impact on Taiwanese economy. These narratives frame U.S. state capacity as declining and imply that the United States could no longer realize any other commitment due to its lack of resources and capacity. The goal of such a narrative is to lower the Taiwanese audience’s belief that the United States will help. But such a narrative does not include keywords of its target group (e.g., Taiwan) nor the PCR’s goal (e.g., unification) and only works through framing and priming as an example of sharp power. 

The specific focus of misinformation narratives related to the United States is composed of Ukraine (28.8%), the economy and fiscal policies (33.1%), technology (25.2%), and vaccine supply (9.9%). Misinformation related to state capacity takes up approximately 52.4%, more than half of all narratives (see Figure A1, part a in the Appendix). In all narratives, political parties are only referenced 27.8% of the time with the DPP the primary target (26.2%), which is almost half of the proportion for state capacity. China is only mentioned in tandem with the United States in 38.4% of the posts (see Figure A1, part b in the Appendix).

Finding 2: Temporal and spatial evidence suggests VPN-based coordination, focused on U.S. issues and addresses.

Once we identified the top misinformation narratives using Line, we investigated information operations or coordination. Line is one of Taiwan’s most popular communication apps featuring chatrooms (similar to WhatsApp), with 83% usage. One limitation of Line is that although we can analyze message content, Line chatrooms can be seen as conversations behind “closed doors”—platforms cannot impose content moderation and researchers have no access to the users themselves nor to the private chatroom in which users engage with misinformation (Chang et al., 2020). PTT, on the other hand, provides a public forum-like environment in which users can interact. Figure 1 shows the co-occurrence network of users who post comments under the same forum. Each circle (node) represents a user who posts on PTT. If two users make mutual comments on more than 200 posts, then they are connected (form a tie). Intuitively, this means if two users are connected or “close” to each other by mutual connections, then they are likely coordinating or have extremely similar behaviors. The placement of the users reflects this and is determined by their connections.

Using the Louvain algorithm (Traag, 2015), a common method to identify communities on social networks, five communities emerged from our dataset. Each community is colored separately, with clear clusters, except for teal which is more integrated. In particular, the yellow cluster is significantly separate from the others. This means they share significant activity amongst their own community, but less so with other communities. This suggests premeditated coordination rather than organic discussion, as the users would have to target the same post with high frequency. Prior studies have shown analyzing temporal patterns can provide insight into information operations. Specifically, overseas content farms often follow a regular cadence, posting content before peak hours in Taiwan on Twitter (Wang et al., 2020) and YouTube (Hsu & Lin, 2023).

To better understand the temporal dynamics on PTT, we plotted the distribution of posts and comments over a 24-hour period. Specifically, we focused on the top two countries by volume—Taiwan and the United States. Figure 2, part a shows the time of posting. Taiwan’s activity increases from 6 in the morning until it peaks at noon (when people are on lunch break), then steadily declines into the night. In contrast, posts from the United States peak at midnight and 8 a.m. Taipei time, which corresponds to around noon and 8 p.m. in New York, respectively. This provides an organic baseline as to when we might expect people to post.

However, in Figure 2, part b, while the distribution for Taiwan (blue) remains unchanged, the peak for the United States (orange) occurs at the same time as Taiwan. One explanation is that users are responding to posts in Taiwan. The second is that users in Asia—potentially China—are using a VPN to appear as if they are in the United States. This coincides with a report by Meta Platforms that found large numbers of CCP-operated Facebook accounts and subsequently removed them (Frenkel, 2023).

The more curious issue is when considering the activity of the yellow group from Figure 1, the temporal pattern (green) shows a sharp increase in activity at 10 a.m., which then coincides with both the peaks for Taiwan (12) and the United States (22). The sudden burst of activity is consistent with prior findings on content farms from China, where posting behavior occurs when content farm workers clock in regularly for work (Wang et al., 2020). While it is difficult to prove the authenticity of these accounts, the structural and temporal aspects suggest coordination. Figure A2 in the appendix shows further evidence of coordination through the frequency distribution of counts for co-occurring posts. For the US-based group, a distribution akin to a power law appears, commonly found within social systems (Adamic & Huberman, 2000; Chang et al., 2023; Clauset et al., 2009). In contrast, the coordinated group features a significantly heavier tail, with a secondary, “unnatural,” peak at around 15 co-occurrences.

To better understand the content of these groups, Table A1 shows the summary of comments of each group and the originating post, using a large-language model for abstractive summarization (see Methods). We report the top points for comments and posts in Table A1. The coordinated community focuses on businessman Terry Gou, who considered running as a blue-leaning independent. The comments attack the incumbent DPP and their stance toward foreign policy. One popular post features President Tsai’s controversial meeting with Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. When a journalist asked McCarthy if he would “invite President Tsai to Congress… or… Washington,” McCarthy replied, “I don’t have any invitation out there right now. Today we were able to meet her as she transits through America, I thought that was very productive.” While this was positively framed, the title of the post itself was translated as “McCarthy will not invite Tsai to the United States” (Doomdied, 2023). This takes on a common tactic in misinformation where statements are intentionally distorted to produce negative framings of a particular candidate.

Comments from U.S. IP addresses between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. focus on the potential alliance between the KMT and TPP. These posts are KMT-leaning with criticism toward both Lai and Ko, who are two oppositional candidates to the KMT. Some users argue that while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a negative force, the United States is not automatically a positive force, as the United States does not explicitly support Taiwan’s international recognition or economic integration. In general, both posts and comments express that Taiwan should not rely too heavily on either China or the United States. This echoes the element of trust in the US-skepticism from the historical experience between ROC and the United States.

Both the U.S.-based and coordinated groups appear as blue-leaning audiences. What differentiates the first and second case is clear evidence of misinformation in the former through inaccurate framing. While US-skepticism may be a valid political stance, if the ambient information environment contains inaccurate information, then the democratic deliberative process is at risk. The case of US-skepticism is also one where stance and truth-value are often conflated, which may influence the process of voter deliberation.

Finding 3: Misinformation is most common among pan-Blue and ROC identity groups on social media and is spread through visual media. These groups share themes with conspiracy groups in Western countries.

Lastly, we considered the groups in which misinformation is common and the way misinformation is delivered. To do so, we queried CrowdTangle using the titles and links from the CoFacts dataset specific to US-Taiwan relations. This yielded 4,632 posts from public groups. Table 2 shows the groups ranked by the total number of misinformation articles identified.

There are two themes to these groups. First, they are often pan-Blue media outlets ( CTI News ), politician support groups ( Wang Yo-Zeng Support Group ), and ROC national identity groups ( I’m an ROC Fan ). The second type is somewhat unexpected but extremely interesting; it consists of groups that espouse freedom of speech ( Support CTI News and Free Speech ) and truth-seeking ( Truth Engineering Taiwan Graduate School ), topics often regarded as conspiracies. These topics are reminiscent of those in the West, such as the rhetoric around “fake news” and “truthers,” and paint a transnational picture of how misinformation coalesces. The second largest group is Trump for the World , which supports a politician known to court conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon. These groups also serve as the “capacity” element of US-skepticism, implying that the United States is in trouble for its domestic issues and is not a reliable partner to Taiwan. Furthermore, these groups have sizable followings—ranging from 8,279 to 43,481. We show the mean, as the total number of members fluctuated over our one-year period.

Lastly, we found that the majority of misinformation contains some form of multimedia, such as video (36%) or photos (15%), as shown in Figure 3, part a. Only 1% is a direct status. This may be due to CrowdTangle not surfacing results from normal users, but the ratio of multimedia to text is quite high. This aligns with extant studies showing the growth of multimodal misinformation (Micallef et al., 2022) and also user behavior in algorithm optimization (Chang et al., 2022; Dhanesh et al., 2022; Pulley, 2020)—posts with multimedia tend to do better than posts with only text.

Moreover, 47% contain a URL. Figure 3, part b shows one of the top domains containing misinformation (beyondnews852.com) after filtering out common domains such as YouTube. The site is named “Beyond News Net” and is visually formatted like a legitimate news site to increase the perceived credibility of information (Flanagin & Metzger, 2007; Wölker & Powell, 2021). The ability to rapidly generate legitimate-looking news sites as a tactic for misinformation may become a challenge for both media literacy and technical approaches to fight misinformation.

We utilized three unique misinformation datasets—Line, Facebook, and PTT—with dates between 01/12/2023 and 11/10/2023. The CoFacts dataset includes 140,193 received messages, 96,432 that have been labeled as misinformation, facts, opinion, or not relevant. Of this, 41,564 entries are misinformation. The CoFacts dataset is not only methodologically useful but exemplifies a crowd-sourced approach to fact-checking misinformation as an actual platform intervention. Moreover, it is public and transparent, allowing for replicability. Using a subset of articles and posts containing misinformation, we trained a topic model using BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022). On a high level, using BERTopic involves five steps: 1) extract embeddings using a sentence transformer, 2) reduce dimensionality, 3) cluster reduced embeddings, 4) tokenize topics, and 5) create topic representation.

We conducted several trials, experimenting with parameters such as different sentence transformer models and minimum cluster sizes for the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. The model used to extract topics for this paper utilized paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 for our sentence embedding model (Reimers & Gurevych, 2019), had a minimum cluster size of 80 for the clustering algorithm, and used tokenize_zh for our tokenizer. Our model yielded 34 topics. We also trained a model based on latent-Dirichlet allocation (LDA) (Blei et al., 2003), but found the BERTopic results to be more interpretable. We then labeled all messages to indicate whether they included reference to the election or not, and ranked the topics by their election-related percentage to measure electoral salience. For our subsequent analysis, we focused on topic 3 (see Table 1), which captures general discourse about the relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan.

The Facebook dataset was extracted using CrowdTangle. We queried posts containing links and headlines from topic 3. We also cross-sectioned these links and headlines with a general election-based dataset with 911,510 posts. This yielded a total of 4,632 of posts shared on public Facebook groups and 227,125 engagements. Due to privacy concerns, it is not possible to obtain private posts from users on their own Facebook timelines, private groups, or messages. However, public groups are a good proxy for general discourse, in addition to providing ethnic or partisan affiliations via their group name (Chang & Fang, 2023). In other words, while CoFacts provides the misinformation narratives, Facebook public groups give insight into the targets of misinformation.

Lastly, we scraped PTT using Selenium. Commonly known as the Reddit of Taiwan, PTT is unique in that it contains the IP address of the poster, though this could be shrouded by proxy farms or VPNs. First, we scraped all posts that contained reference to the United States and the election, which yielded 22,576 posts and 1,983,396 comments, all with IP addresses, addresses provided by PTT, and the time of posting. We expanded the scope of this analysis as we were interested in the general discourse directly related to the United States, and the geospatial and temporal patterns that arose. 

Due to the large amount of data, there are three general approaches we could have taken—local extractive summarization with LLMs, local abstractive summarization with LLMs, and server-based abstractive summarization (such as ChatGPT). Local extractive summarization is a method that embeds each of the input sentences and then outputs five of the most representative sentences. However, this approach is often too coarse, as it returns sentences with the highest centrality but does not summarize general themes across all the different comments or posts. On the other hand, abstractive summarization works by considering the entire context by ingesting many documents and then summarizing across them. This provides a more generalized characterization of key themes. However, the input size is the primary bottleneck as large-language models can only ingest so many tokens (or words), which also need to be held in memory—the case for our project, as we are summarizing more than 10,000 posts.

To circumvent these issues, we sampled the maximum number of posts or comments that could fit within 16,000 tokens and then made a query call using the ChatGPT API. This provided a summary based on a probabilistic sample of the posts and comments.

• / Elections

Cite this Essay

Chang, H. C. H., Wang, A. H. E., & Fang Y. S. (2024). US-skepticism and transnational conspiracy in the 2024 Taiwanese presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-144

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No funding has been received to conduct this research.

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

No human subjects were included in this study.

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

Data Availability

All materials needed to replicate this study are available via the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5SPGDY . The Cofacts database is available on HuggingFace and Facebook via CrowdTangle per regulation of Meta Platforms.

Acknowledgements

H. C. would like to thank Brendan Nyhan, Sharanya Majumder, John Carey, and Adrian Rauschfleish for their comments. H. C. would like to thank the Dartmouth Burke Research Initiation Award.

All authors contributed equally.