As long as a nation has access to the internet, they will always have to deal with cyber risks. Whether it be spam, malware, viruses, phishing attacks, or data breaches, a nation will always be at risk of suffering from continuous cyber threats. Two of the many affected nations are the United States and India.

In the United States there is a large risk for the average citizen to come across a phishing attack. In his paper, Alex Kigerl mentions that the United States suffers from 60% of the worlds volume of phishing attacks^[1]. That is to say the United States is targeted the most for phishing attacks. Another risk to consider in the US is a data breach. Whether it is the recent Facebook breach of 2021 that led to the personal information of millions being leaked online, or the infamous Yahoo! breach of 2013 that led to several billion people having their personal information stolen by hackers, many US based companies remain targets for possible data breaches.

In India there is also the risk of being targeted by a phishing attack. However, rather than being targeted by a standard phishing attack that is meant to target a general audience, instead they are targeted by spear-fishing attacks. The point of spear-phishing is to target a specific individual rather than a large population. The article “Big phishing attacks are getting more personal” reveals how a journalist was the victim of a spear phishing attack that had made her believe she would be teaching at Harvard University^[2]. Unfortunately the journalist would not be the only one to suffer from that type of cyber attack as many others be affected by spear phishing attacks. The attacks may not always be targeting an individuals money, but there is also the likely chance that the cyber attacker is after an individual’s personal information. Once the attacker acquires enough personal data they can commit fraudulent acts while using another person’s name.

References

[1]: Alex Kigerl, Cyber Crime Nation Typologies: K-Means Clustering of Countries Based on Cyber Crime Rates, 2016.

[2]: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/big-phishing-attacks-are-getting-more-personal/articleshow/80324658.cms#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20recent%20report,and%20focused%20on%20small%20companies.