Thursday, January 14, 2010

Timeline of Chiese Cyber Espionage

This image is from a Northrop Grumman report published by United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission that we will read later in the semester. It provides great context for Google's recent announcement about cyber attacks on its network.


1 comment:

Unknown said...

It is interesting to look at the timeline of cyber attacks and how they seem to follow an 'exponential' growth. As the digital age grows, new methods of cyber-attacks are developed. We need to be able to keep up with this growing frequency of attacks in order to remain competitive in the realm of electronic data transfer.

I am a physics major, and this semester I am taking a micro-electronics class in which we are learning to create silicon chips that are used in the construction of integrated circuits. It is interesting to be able to compare similarities to the growth of the digital age between information privacy and the growth of electronic circuits. The first integrated circuit was huge compared to the size of which we are developing them today. What used to take of the size of a textbook now takes up the size of a drop of water. Both of these fields have experienced an exponential growth over the recent years -- one that starts of slow and then takes tremendous leaps as time goes on.

However, there is a major difference between the growth of electronic devices and the growth of information security. There is a limit to the growth of both of these; however, I feel that we will reach the limit of electronic device size way before the limit of the growth of information exchange. New methods will always be developed using the same devices we have had for years that allow for faster, easier, and more secure methods of data exchange.