Exploring Attacks on Availability

An attack on availability is a cyber attack focused on networks, data, and systems of a company and is typically meant to steal data or disrupt work. each type of attack has a specific goal in mind, for ddos attacks its goal is to disrupt a websites services by overloading there network and slowing it down to an unusable state or shutting it down for a period. as for ransomware attacks the goal is typically to infiltrate and steal data from a compony to then sell back to that company for ransom. the recent example of a ddos attack would be the Git-hub ddos attack, this attack on availability happened on Feb.28.2018, and was one of the strongest ddos attacks recorded at the time with over 1tbs being used to overload the GitHub servers. Durring this attack the Git-hub staff struggled while they got in contact with there “DDos mitigation service Akamai Prolexic”. Once Akamai Prolexic started to redirect traffic to the website it only took about 10 minutes for the attackers to give up. this event shows the damages that a ddos attack can have on a company and the importance of having preventative and/or safety measures in place for if a attack does happen. The implications of these attacks heavily relay on if it was successful of not, a successful ransomware attack or ddos will most likely breed copycat attacks while unsuccessful ones will deter others from trying. as long as people take the measures to prevent these attacks and shut them down quickly they will become less common.

Citation– Newman, L.H. (2018) GitHub survived the biggest ddos attack ever recorded, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/github-ddos-memcached (Accessed: 27 March 2025).

 

Cyber Roles & Responsibilities

System Administrators are known as the backbone of an IT’s infrastructure, they are normally responsible for maintaining employee accounts, software and hardware maintenance and networking. without the System Admins company’s wouldn’t be able to run smoothly, because they handle keeping systems up to date, making networks run smoothly, and more company’s would run into constant IT related road blocks that would cost them time and money. one of the largest responsibility’s of a System Admin is handling installation, maintenance, and configuring of hardware and software, this is important because many companies may want specific configurations of there computers and other devices. having someone able to configure these devices could allow for users to have an easier time accessing internet, necessary programs for an employee’s job(exell, word, ext), and also block access to websites that a company may want to block from employees. system admins are also given the crucial task of overseeing backup and recovery operations. this is important because the NIST framework list having a plan for the backup and recovery of data as an important practice for a good cyber security. one of the last tasks given to the system admins is maintaining and creating accounts for employees, this means every employee who needs accesses to the company’s systems has a means of accessing it and that employees are accessing only what they need. A good admin would typically require some form of two factor authorization of gaining access to an account and depending on if there company is large or not might consider using a role based access control system.    

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework

Organizations can determine how secure they currently are and take steps to improve their cyber security by comparing the framework to their security system. The NIST framework has 4 tiers ranging from least secure to most, organizations should know which tier they currently are, which tier aligns with their company goals, and what their security weak points are to efficiently use the framework to improve their cyber security. If I were to use this framework at a future workplace the first thing I would do is check my company’s policies, goals, and history. This helps understand the scope of the company’s cyber security needs and if they have had any security problems. Next, I would create a profile, using the framework core I would look to see what categories are being met, and which aren’t. I would then do a risk assessment using the information I’ve collected. During the risk assessment, I would highlight events I think are likely to happen without changes and the impact those events would have. Finally, I would compare the company’s security to where I feel it needs to be and create a plan to implement the necessary changes.