Cybersecurity is an activity aimed at protecting systems, networks and programs from digital attacks. The goal of such cyberattacks is usually to gain access to confidential information, modify or destroy it, extort money from users, or disrupt normal business processes. The role of corporations in dealing with cyber-attacks and breaches is essential and in many cases represent a national interest. Therefore, the way enterprises of different sizes approach this issue represent a particular interest.
First, it is worth indicating some of the key reasons for corporations to be in the center of cybersecurity discussion. The reality is that cyber-attacks occur on a daily basis, some of them are enormous and profound. One of the most obvious target for hackers is storages containing secret corporate information and a large amount of personal data. The latter is often of a much greater interest since essentially opens the door to large-scale fraud.
At the meantime, corporations do not seem to be preoccupied with the potential threat they are facing. With their clients and employees’ personal information at stake, the often prefer reacting to cyberattacks to preventing them (Guiora, 2017). Unwillingness to internalize the danger is understandably dictated by a desire to avoid financial burden associated with smart and reliable cybersecurity strategy implementation. However, the approach is self-defeated since it inevitably harms company’s stakeholders (primarily customers and investors) and undermines effective law enforcement in this field (Guiora, 2017). Moreover, with an increasing financial cost of cybersecurity measures, the cost associated with consequences of ignorance is projected to rise, too (Johnson, 2015) Therefore, corporations have to face their vulnerabilities, acknowledge them and put efforts to minimize any risk of information leakage by focusing on continuous self-assessment and improvement.
Interestingly, from the Christian perspective, cybersecurity is more than a hackers’ attacks prevention, it is a moral necessity. Apart from the well-known commandment “Thou shalt not steal” (English Standard Version Bible 2001, Matthew 19:18), the Bible proclaims the inviolability of the human dignity by calling to love your neighbor. Indeed, as Christianity declares, a human was created at the God’s image meaning that no technologies should be utilized to undermine a person’s right for information safety and privacy. The ethical principle of love and caring for neighbor must be guided by when dealing with cybersecurity.
Nonetheless, even high-reputation innovative corporations fail to ensure their personal data security commitments. One of the most recent incident happened to LinkedIn this summer. It became known that the data of 700 million users of the social network were being sold on the Internet. A database of LinkedIn users has appeared on one of the popular hacking forums (Marks, 2021). The source said that the complete database includes various information, including the names of users, their mailbox addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, geolocation data, social network names and links to personal pages, etc. Forum user who published part of the database data, claims that in total he has information on 700 million LinkedIn users. With about 756 million people currently registered on the social network, the leak potentially affects 92% of the platform’s users (Marks, 2021). As you can imagine, the scale of the leak is huge, because LinkedIn is the main career social network in which people of different professions and positions are registered. Clearly, the cyberattack is not just a violation of privacy. In fact, it also represents a threat to national security because the collected data is classified as sensitive and can potentially be used in further attacks.
The corporation has publicly ignored warnings from the NCSC, who shared their concerns about the vulnerabilities of LinkedIn’s servers. In April, the company rejected the possibility of a data breach and apparently did not attach much importance to cybersecurity. After the incident, representatives of the company did not admit their guilt, stating that the leaked data could not be obtained as a result of a cyber-attack (Marks, 2021). Unfortunately, the social network was unable to protect the data of its users by choosing a protection strategy instead of the tactics of active involvement in the problem.
References
English Standard Version Bible. (2001). ESV Online. Web.
Guiora, A. N. (2017). How do corporations respond to cybercrime? In Cybersecurity: Geopolitics, law, and policy (1st ed., pp. 89–111). Routledge.
Johnson, T. A. (2015). Cybersecurity threat landscape and future trends. In T. A. Johnson (Ed.), Cybersecurity: Protecting critical infrastructures from cyber attack and cyber warfare (1st ed., pp. 287–322). CRC Press.
Marks, G. (2021). A LinkedIn ‘Breach’ exposes 92% of Users—And other small business tech news. Forbes.