Question

Let’s look at a real-world scenario and how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plays into it. In the scenario, the United States will be hit by a large-scale, coordinated cyber attack organized by China. These attacks debilitate the functioning of government agencies, parts of the critical infrastructure, and commercial ventures. The IT infrastructure of several agencies are paralyzed, the electric grid in most of the country is shut down, telephone traffic is seriously limited and satellite communications are down (limiting the Department of Defense’s [DOD’s] ability to communicate with commands overseas). International commerce and financial institutions are also severely hit. Please explain how DHS should handle this situation.

Answer 1

The steps needed to be taken by DHS to handle the given situation:

• The DHS need to handle the situation from various level in various dimensions.
• There are crisis response and suitable resolution formulas should be identified, enforcement of more security measures, the legal measures should be follow up after the resolution against the suspected parties, etc.
• First and foremost important thing that DHS should be concentrated is resolution of the situation by suitable crisis response processes.
• Isolate the network from suspected networks and perform the quick investigation to find the actual sources of attack. In this case it is a large scale coordinated cyber-attack.
• Remove the threats from the systems by adequate skilled professionals and implement the needed security measures to prevent it in future.
• Threat monitoring and rapid response team should be strengthen to avoid such attacks in future.
• Perform the check in the various departments to find out the security measures taken by them or going to implement.
• A national level standard of security should make mandatory to all the firms and departments in the country. Thus the isolated failures can be avoided, since they are also results in security bottlenecks.
• Enhance the user awareness and build a responsible behaviour and actions.