Internet Cyber Security Pirates

In old days, pirates were the group of people who perform series of criminal activities on a boat or ship over the sea area. For instance, let’s look at the history: how we learn cyber security from the real pirates story. In 1522, three people from Cuba went to Spain. They loaded precious stuff like gold, pearls, Jewries and so on onto their boat. The historical situation was that five distinguishable boats appear suddenly in the area at the moment the travelers started their trip and the treasure-loaded ships couldn’t escape. After a short fight and stealing gold, this story inspires generations to come and launch what is known as the “Golden Age of Piracy.”

In the past the sea was a domain contains commercial and communication; however, these days the sea is a domain with information and Internet. These types of pirates do various activities to damage cyber secure, from stealing and hacking, to trade and to leak (sell, share) economic information and military secrets, which causes unexpected huge damage. For instance, in 1812 war period, the American pirates took over 517 ships (more than) U.S. Navy’s 23. Even though the end of the real war is that British won; the private American caused harmful damage to the British economy using the information they stole.

Let’s look into the main challenges of the modern cyber security in order to learn what we have learned from the real pirate has taught us. To sum up, the biggest challenge is that “internet pirate” can quickly identify and relocate, shielded by the third party.

Nowadays, based on literature search, maritime pirate is still existing. There was a great example that pirates helped US against British back in to the year 1812 1861. President Lincoln stopped killing all the pirates instead he decided to utilized the power they owed.

Since the cyber security sea is much like the real sea, the historical idea inspired the modern cyber security piracy defending. People came up two main strategies to prevent massive cyber attack. The first strategy is to shut down the pirate network by interrupting bad behavior in strict market, then in the private-friendly place the transactions will be killed. Hence, without the support of networks, illegal actions will become more and more difficult to practice. Although by doing this the cyber security will be much safer, the cyber security sea would not be cleaned. Here comes the second solution, establishing a serious of rules and norm to allow open sea trade. By doing this, the open sea commercial trade will be open and supervised. Setting norm can help two individual group complete task without building deep trust and relationship.

The lesson here tells us that the historical real sea pirates can be applied in internet cyber security pirates. It is a definitely better idea that commerce and communication make safe and freewheeling pirates and privateers brought under control.