It 238 Week 4 Assignment

Executive Summary

The United States is at grave danger. The threat of a cyber-attack could very well cripple the infrastructure that the US uses in order to run its day to day functions as well as its industry and military capabilities. With the advent of new technology happening every day, it is important that the US spend as much time and effort defending its online “self” as much as it spends defending its real life nation. The purpose of this executive summary is to outline potential issues, how to resolve, and the progress we are making to better defend ourselves.

There are many threats that can take place in the online realm, it is our job to not only secure our sensitive hardware but also take measures to prevent and deter potential hackers from breaching our systems. Different levels of attacks are categorized into tiers to better describe them:

• Tiers 1 and 2 are mostly exploit known vulnerabilities

• Tiers 2 and 4 are better funded and usually include a level of expertise to discover new vulnerabilities

• Tiers 5 and 6 are the largest in terms of funding and are usually created to use against systems.

The problem lies within our networks themselves. We are seeing a lot of intellectual property and information being stolen by simple acts from infected devices. The amount of military data stolen includes designs for weapons systems, engineering data, etc. There has even been evidence of attacks against our US power grids, which we rely on heavily.

There has been an influx of “bad” hardware in our DoD which is potentially counterfeit and meant to cause harm to the infrastructure. In a world where our mission vital networking equipment is mostly manufactured in countries not controlled by us, we may run into problems within the supply chain. A strict Supply Chain