Autumn 2022 Buffalo Business 19
many third parties most organizations have to work with and
trust.
AK: The other thing to consider are attacks from the
physical realm onto the cyber realm. For example, cutting
transatlantic cables to the United States would be a massive
attack on economic and communications infrastructure
around the world. Or, one good missile packed with buck-
shot at the right height could take out most of the GPS
satellites, which would disrupt all of our transportation,
location and communication systems, not to mention
all the GPS targeting for our military.
DS: It's important to draw a distinction between
these different types of cyberwarfare. A lot of what we're
seeing on the news is information warfare—with fake social
media posts and flooding communications channels with
garbage data. But another, perhaps less flashy, kind of attack
are distributed denial of service attacks that cause the
breakdown of web services around the world and are a
real concern even beyond information warfare.
AK: As for businesses, the old thinking was
that they'd protect their computer systems because
it would affect stock prices, but the reality is that it
doesn't. Stocks may lose points for a short period
of time, but studies have shown that within a year,
prices are back up to where they were before the
breach. What I worry about is that people will give
up and take all of it as the price of doing business,
and then it won't be just losing your customer
base or some credit card numbers, it'll be a
power plant, oil refinery or sewage treatment
plant shut down. The one thing we cannot do is
give up.
DS: Unfortunately, many companies
won't do anything until there's some sort of
legislation with teeth, and that is the current
push. And the "with teeth" part is import-
ant because we do have legislation, but it
has largely bared no teeth. There is some
optimism, however, in the form of general
consumers—we have to vote with our
money and push companies to do better
with the information they're storing, and how
they're storing it and securing their systems.
