1. Describe three ways that computers have made the world safer and less safe.

2. How do engineers make cyber networks safer?

Computers have impacted almost every aspect of human life, we shop on computers, work on computers, and even relax with computers.  The ability to find a task for a computer to assist humans has covered almost all of society.  One of the most interesting avenues of computers is cybersecurity and the protection of data from unauthorized access.  Computers have been used to keep us safe in many ways, for example computers help us drive our cars and stay safe.  Electronic cruise control, lane assist, intelligent breaking, back up cameras, and autonomous driving all keep us safe on the road and ensure we get to our destination in one piece.  Computers help manage home security systems and can send us alerts that our home had an intruder or video of a suspicious person.  Additionally, we can use encryption to encode data and make it only available to authorized users, keeping our information integrity and confidentiality.  As great as those safety advances have been however computers still have harmed safety in some ways.  For starters private information is available about almost all of us online now.  This information could be used by stalkers or criminals to target individuals.  Another way technology makes us less safe is by linking criminals together online to share and practice their criminal abilities, for example hackers learning ransomware techniques on a dark web forum.  And lastly the dependence on technology for key infrastructure has created some environments where workers don’t know how to manually complete the duties and are dependent on computers to get the systems operational.

Engineers make cyber networks safer by building them with security in mind, monitoring them for safe or suspicious traffic, and constantly improving them or defending them from attacks and vulnerabilities.  An engineer can be considered like a train conductor keeping the trains running well, and making sure the railways are clear of danger, when he sees an issue, he attempts to fix it before a problem arises.