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Cyber Attacks Change Everything


7PM Wednesday April 21, 2010

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Every aspect of national, economic, and personal security needs to be re-thought because of what can be accomplished by cyber attacks.

Scott
Borg

U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit

A common nightmare scenario in the business world is that a hacker will crack a company's digital defenses, steal sensitive data or disable the network. Scott Borg, director and chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (US-CCU), an independent organization that churns out information security data on behalf of the government, says enterprises face a darker possibility.

Online outlaws could quietly penetrate the network and, over six to eight months, alter critical data so that it's no longer accurate. For instance, an attacker could access a health insurance company's patient records and modify information on a person's prescriptions or surgical history. Or an attacker could access an automotive company's database and tamper with specifications on various car parts.

 

 

Scott Borg is Director and Chief Economist of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Strategies, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College.

The U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (CCU) is an independent research group that was set up to provide the United States government with economic and strategic assessments of the consequences of possible cyber-attacks. Although it was initially funded by the U.S. government, it is not part of any government department and has no official government status. This allows the CCU to protect the confidential information of the corporations that help it with its research and that would often be unwilling to share their information with the government. The primary concern of the CCU is the sort of large scale cyber-attacks that could be mounted by criminal organizations, terrorist groups, rogue corporations, and nation states, but it also considers ordinary hacker mischief and white collar crime.