This research investigates a new vision for increasing the resilience of computing clouds by elevating continuous change, evolution, and misinformation as first-rate design principles of the cloud's infrastructure. The work is motivated by the fact that today's clouds are very static, uniform, and predictable, allowing attackers who identify a vulnerability in one of the services or infrastructure components to spread their effect to other, mission-critical services. The goal is to integrate into clouds a new level of unpredictability for both their services and data so as to both impede an adversary's ability to achieve an initial system compromise and, if a compromise occurs, to detect, disrupt, and/or otherwise impede their ability to exploit this success.

In a very interconnected world, cyber vulnerability is real. Kirsten Koepsel, lawyer and engineer specializing in cyber security, talks with SAE International about how this new environment affects the planes and airports we use every day.

Today, more than 8 billion devices are connected around the world, including medical devices, wearables, vehicles, and smart household and city technologies. Those devices are vulnerable to hacker attacks that locate, intercept, and overwrite the data, jamming signals. One method to protect the data is frequency hopping, which sends each data packet, containing thousands of individual bits, on a random, unique radio frequency (RF) channel, so hackers can't pin down any given packet. Hopping large packets, however, is just slow enough that hackers can still execute an attack.

Transferring data using light passed along fiber optic cables has become increasingly common over the past decades, but each pulse currently contains millions of photons. That means that in principle, a portion of these could be intercepted without detection. Secure data is already encrypted, but if an eavesdropper was able to intercept the signals containing details of the code, in theory they could access and decode the rest of the message.

Vehicle cybersecurity vulnerabilities could impact a vehicle's safe operation. Therefore, engineers should ensure that systems are designed free of unreasonable risks to motor vehicle safety, including those that may result due to existence of potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The automotive industry is making vehicle cybersecurity an organizational priority. Prioritizing vehicle cybersecurity also means learning about vehicle hacking techniques in order to ensure that systems will be reasonably safe under expected real-world conditions, including those that may arise due to potential vehicle cybersecurity vulnerabilities from hacking the CAN communications or OBD-II interface. The automotive cybersecurity environment is dynamic and is expected to change continually and, at times, rapidly. Developing a basic understanding of car hacking can provide a good foundation for developing approaches to vehicle cybersecurity.

In 2017, the healthcare industry experienced a dramatic surge in cyberattacks. Thousands of healthcare organizations around the world suffered various attacks — from data theft to ransomware attacks. Among them was the notorious WannaCry ransomware attack, which affected over 300,000 machines across 150,000 countries, including the United States. As many as 200,000 Windows systems were impacted by WannaCry, including nearly 50 healthcare facilities in the UK, and dozens more in the United States. The infections from WannaCry impacted medical devices as well, putting hospital staff — and patient safety — at risk.