Adriana Keesecker
09/03/26
Cybersecurity, Technology, and Society
This essay will discuss one of the most important concepts that relates to cybersecurity: The CIA Triad. The CIA Triad stands for confidentiality, integrity, and availability. These three are a part of the model that ensures certain systems are safe to use and keep important information in a place that can not get disturbed by the wrong people. In today’s world of technology becoming more popular, it is important that significant information is being stored in a safe place and the CIA Triad is a way to ensure the right people have access to it and it is protected.
The three concepts to the CIA Triad are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. All three play an important role in protecting technology and basic cybersecurity practices. Confidentiality is important when it comes to cyber security because it protects important information from being accessed by people who are not authorized to access it. There are specific cyber security practices like passwords and multi factor authentication to maintain the confidentiality within organizations. Without this concept within cybersecurity, organizations will be exposed to the risks of their information becoming exposed or misused and no one but the company is hit with the financial loss. Integrity is important because it ensures that information that relates to an organization is complete and accurate in their systems. Organizations have to be able to come back to specific information in their databases, if this information is compromised and not accurate, it makes it hard to make decisions within their business. Lastly, availability is important relating to cybersecurity because it allows only authorized users to access information and systems at any time they need it. Organizations rely on their systems and data daily to make certain decisions relative to their business, it is important that only the right people have this within their reach.
After doing some research, I came across an incident with a credit reporting agency named Equifax. This is one of the three largest credit reporting agencies in the United States. They announced in September 2017 that its systems had been breached and the important personal data of 148 million Americans had been compromised. The data that was leaked included names, home addresses, date of births, and Social Security numbers. As a result of this, there also had been about 209,000 consumers’ credit cards that were also breached. This real world situation is an example of confidentiality being not exercised in this situation. Due to their systems not being as secure as they should’ve been, the privacy of customers were leaked as a result of this. There was then a settlement for Equifax customers who were affected by this, they were able to file a claim for free credit monitoring so if anything looked suspicious in the future they were getting an alert of this. The customers who were affected by the breach were able to request a payment of $20,000 for reparations.
There are a few cyber security strategies that an organization like Equifax could use to improve the likelihood of this kind of situation in the future. I think that Equifax could start to use strong access controls like multi-factor authentication. This just ensures that there is an extra layer of protection so only the right person is getting access to the information. I also think Equifax would benefit from regular security test testing, this can help organizations identify certain weaknesses within their systems before an attacker can discover them. I don’t want to say that Equifax was not doing all they can to protect their customers’ information, but they’re definitely was not enough security happening for all of their customers’ information to be leaked the way it was.
In conclusion, the CIA Triad is an important concept in relation to cybersecurity. CIA Triad stands for confidentiality, integrity, and availability and it is important for organizations to relate to this acronym to keep their clients and systems safe from attackers.
Works Cited
Electronic Privacy Information Center. (n.d.). Equifax data breach. https://archive.epic.org/privacy/data-breach/equifax/