VOA标准英语2013--Experts Say More Research Needed to Foil Cyber

 

Experts Say More Research Needed to Foil Cyber

 

It doesn’t matter who you are or where you live - if you have access to a computer, you are a potential target for cyber criminals.

And it’s not just individuals at risk.  

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, charged eight people for launching cyber attacks on foreign banks that could have netted $45 million.

“This was a 21st century bank heist that reached through the Internet to span the globe.  But instead of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and malware,” Lynch said.

Alan Edwards, president of the web security consulting firm Whitehorse Technology Solutions, says the foiled heist, and recent revelations that U.S. missile defense¹ systems may have been breached² by Chinese hackers³,  underscore the growing sophistication of cyber criminals.

“They’ve changed from being 14 year-old geniuses who are bored, just trying to crash the system to cause trouble, to now organized crime, to government-sponsored, quite frankly,” Edwards said.

Edwards’ company specializes in providing real time web traffic security and monitoring.

He says not everyone likes the added expense to pay for this until they realize a successful attack would cost much more.

“Unfortunately it’s like car insurance or any other insurance. You really hate paying for it, until you have an accident,” Edwards said.

While beefed up network security is crucial criminology professor David Maimon, of the University of Maryland, says that's only half the solution.

“The way we’re doing things right now in computer science, and in our attempt to solve this issue, is by simply focusing on the network and the computers.  And that would be the equivalent of a criminologist trying to figure out why an individual committed a crime by focusing on the gun or the door,” Maimon said.

Among Maimon's more controversial findings is the correlation⁴ between the number of foreign students logged into the college network and the frequency and origin of the cyber attacks.

“In other words, what we find is that increasing the number of foreign students that arrive from specific countries increases the probability of our campus to receive attacks from those specific countries by around 40 percent,” Maimon said.

Maimon says more research is needed, but one explanation may be that foreign students are surfing compromised websites in their own countries giving hackers new pathways to exploit.  Maimon's research hopes to break new ground by examining the motivations behind recent cyber attacks and how a potential victim's online behavior can enable or discourage future attacks.

1 defense   

n.防御，保卫；[pl.]防务工事；辩护，答辩

参考例句：

• The accused has the right to defense.被告人有权获得辩护。
• The war has impacted the area with military and defense workers.战争使那个地区挤满了军队和防御工程人员。

2 breached   

攻破( breach的现在分词 )； 破坏，违反

参考例句：

• These commitments have already been breached. 这些承诺已遭背弃。
• Our tanks have breached the enemy defences. 我方坦克车突破了敌人的防线。

3 hackers   

n.计算机迷( hacker的名词复数 )；私自存取或篡改电脑资料者，电脑“黑客”

参考例句：

• They think of viruses that infect an organization from the outside.They envision hackers breaking into their information vaults. 他们考虑来自外部的感染公司的病毒，他们设想黑客侵入到信息宝库中。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Arranging a meeting with the hackers took weeks againoff-again email exchanges. 通过几星期电子邮件往来安排见面，他们最终同意了。 来自互联网

4 correlation   

n.相互关系，相关，关连

参考例句：

• The second group of measurements had a high correlation with the first.第二组测量数据与第一组高度相关。
• A high correlation exists in America between education and economic position.教育和经济地位在美国有极密切的关系。