The protection of critical infrastructure

Blerim Abedini, ISSD-North Macedonia

Technological developments challenge man for appropriate direction he should take in his life. Robotics has significantly replaced the physical work that man did with own hands in the past decades-centuries. Working on a computer with certain software, can manage various public domains where the man is in background of the scenes. This challenge has its price, which through protection from daily cyber attacks, can cost millions of dollars.

Human life are changed thankfully to exterior and interior factors. One of the impositions that man faces is technological development. The microchip gave men possibility to manage many public domain in the industry. It replaces the physical work of man.

The world at the same time develops the competitive markets, by daily data information coming from many sides of world. The US has achieved success in the area of controlling the public infrastructure throughout the computers which manages high powers with robotic or automatic mechanisms. So providing critical infrastructure data at common center, makes the job easy but also requests security expensives against cyber attacks. However, the world is not systematized anywhere in this way. Cybercrime is present in fragile governments that allow certain individuals or groups to be organized. These crime groups as cybercriminals are using different methods of attack, who mainly have financial or political purposes. Groups, by this way of organizing have opportunity to expand as an international network by finding affiliates via the internet. Understandably, every job is paid for the success achieved during cybercrime engagement. We hear various news, when cybercrime groups are demanding large sums of money for secret documents of personalities from publishing.

So apparently dangerous groups can also become a tool of autocratic governments, to achieve any political goal. We saw cyber attacks in Northern Macedonia during the digital vote count in the early election, during closing voting pools. For a while any updated results via the internet page of Election Commission were blocked. This show us that the institutions in Northern Macedonia do not spend enough money from the budget for protection against cyber attacks.

Individuals or groups participating in cyber attacks. Photo by ‘reportcybercrime.com’.

The critical infrastructure that we need to control with the IT system, requires security and spending of money from budget against cyber attacks by criminal groups. These expenditures should be calculated during of designing of the state budget. So we conclude that (developed) countries that, control critical infrastructure with computers within different speed, have more costs for protection against cyber attacks.

While the world in some areas has unique database for updating data, such is in the stock markets, this public domain requires responsibility from member states to provide the security agencies for flowing database through the digital system. China has globalized the stock market by taking a step further in US stock exchanges. This step on investment interactivity will continuously increase due to external

technological factors which are rising daily. The cold peace seems to have been influenced by climate change which has brought devastating phenomena to many states from East to West, who do not have enough financial reserves for protection. Digitalization is our future. It ensures a favorable life and control over all difficult jobs with adequate software. The earth is in the hand of man, as Archimedes had said: Give me a fairly long lever and a fulcrum, and I will move the world!