Towards a Baltic Sea Region Strategy in Critical ... - Helsinki.fi

CHAPTER III: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY
and opinions indicate that the economic dimension may present extremely
formidable but surmountable challenges that require truly committed and decisive
strategic actions.
Social dimension
The relative influence of the social dimension on the functional state of
information infrastructures is arguably more pronounced compared to other
infrastructure types. For instance, in utility infrastructure the commodity (e.g.,
electricity, water, gas etc.) is mostly delivered on a one-way path from the source
or point of generation to the end users, thus limiting the way in which the end user
couldinfluence the functional state the infrastructure. By comparison, the
information infrastructure affords end users bidirectional connectivity to both
receive and send the primary commodity (payload or information), the ability to
interact with infrastructure elements anywhere around the globe, and the
increasing capability to customize their own services, profiles and so forth. Signs
abound of increased confidence within these empowered users, from the
proliferation of feature-rich Smartphones to the thriving Web 2.0 hosted
applications and communities. 94
However, the mass adoption of ICT devices provides an increasing security
challenge, as each user terminal not only presents a sitting target for threat actors
but may also serve as a launching point for attacks on the networks to which they
are connected. For instance, personal computers connected to the Internet could
have their computing power harnessed to perform some useful computationally
intensive calculations (e.g., for the design of life-saving drugs) (Buyya et al 2003).
Unfortunately, cyber criminals may use similar principles to form a ‘botnet’
comprised of thousands of compromised computers or zombies that launch e-mail
spam, malware, identity theft attempts and many other nefarious schemes (Goth
2007) 95 . To that end, individual users should also be considered as one of the key
security factors when addressing overall CIIP strategy. As some IT security experts
note, humans tend to be the weakest link in the security chain (Granger 2006).
This calls for an intensification of strategic actions by relevant actors in both the
public and private sectors that specifically target individual users of ICTs. These
actions may include:
• Increasing Security Awareness: Threat actors are always looking to
capitalize on user ignorance, negligence and susceptibility to social
engineering attempts. Awareness of the risks involved in routine actions,
such as: surfing the World Wide Web with a browser’s security level set
to ‘Low’; opening emails received from unknown sources; or leaving a
mobile handset default PIN code of 0000 or 1234 unchanged, is a
significant step in countering security threats. A user who is reasonably
94 The latest (August 2007) figures from the web monitoring company Alexa indicate that the Web
2.0 websites such as YouTube, MySpace, Baidu, Orkut and Facebook feature prominently in the
list of top 10 most popular sites (ALEXA 2007).
95 Goth (2007) quotes an industry insider stating “Now I think of botnets as grid computing gone
bad — they have infinite free computer power and free bandwidth. There is no way to stop this
problem if you’re trying to do it yourself. Your costs will scale with the amount of attacks you’re
receiving.”
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