Cyber Attack and Countermeasures Discussion

In this scenario, hackers launch cyber attacks that affect several parts of the nation’s financial infrastructure over several weeks. Specifically, sensitive credit card processing facilities are hacked, and numbers are released to the Internet, causing 120 million cards to be canceled; automated teller machines (ATMs) fail nearly simultaneously across the nation; major companies report payroll checks are not being received by workers, and several large pension and mutual fund companies have computer malfunctions so severe that they are unable to operate for more than a week. Identify the countermeasures that need to be implemented to prevent these cyber attacks from occurring in the future.

following countermeasures needs to be implemented to prevent these kinds of cyber attacks from occurring in future:

Critical financial infrastructure must be protected by enterprise level firewall and similar security mechanism,

strict rules must be declared to access the contents of these infrastructure of the user will be blocked from the resources ( blocking that IP and session)

there must be activity monitor program that logs the user behavior in real time and raise an alarm when its abnormal, such as when it detects bots instead of organic traffic.

Explanation:

Card processing facilities must issue virtual numbers that would mask the real credit or debit card info, such as a QR code which can be used along with multi factor authentication , when it gets compromised with attacks, we will have the resources to continue our work with unmasked details.

All of the financial information should not be stored in a single server only , we can keep them on a distributed basis.

overall , to avoid such attacks we need a strong firewall and sever protection, smart methods to mask our real card details, and when such attacks happens, we need to ensure that any such public information of card details is removed as soon as possible.