As a country built on many digital infrastructures, the U.S. faces a multitude of cybersecurity risks. It seems like every other day there is a new hack or exploit on an American company.
As one of the world’s leading countries, the U.S. can look like a nice honey pot for adversaries to exploit. A country that has had similar cybersecurity risks and concerns as the U.S is the country of Israel. These two countries have been working side by side in cyber collaboration. An event that showed the world that these two countries were allied in cyber was when Pandora’s Box of cyberwarfare was unlocked in 2005. A computer worm named “Stuxnet” was developed to target Iran’s nuclear program. It has been widely accepted that the United States and Israel were behind the occurrence. They had the motive, and technological advances to pull off the sophisticated attack.
As Israel has been in constant conflict with neighboring states, they took the action back in the early 2010s to ramp up their forces in cybersecurity with the help of Prof. Isaac Ben-Israel. In his report to help make Israel one of the top 5 counties in cyber security, he recommended an interdisciplinary approach -to focus not only on the technology but to also pay attention to the social aspects of cyber. His approach was successful as Israel is now one of the leading counties in cybersecurity.
In recent years, the U.S. and other countries like Israel find themselves not in fear of nuclear destruction, but cyber manipulation. Now coined as the “new perfect weapon” cyber weapons in contrast to nuclear weapons are cheaper and more readily available to anyone with the skills, equipment, and determination. Unlike nuclear weapons, cyber-attacks are untraceable. Finding who infiltrated the attack is simply a guessing game. When nuclear destruction was the threat, only a few nation-states had possession of them. Now with cyber weapons, criminal groups, terrorist groups, nation-states, or any individual who has the drive and motivation can be a key player. The startling realization of this accessible vulnerability we have in our essential infrastructure is an alarming concern for not only the United States, and other countries, but for our humanity.