Our digital world today has evolved alongside our fast-paced
world. The meaning of the internet meant
something entirely different to previous generations.
Estonia has been receiving some recent appraisal for
internet freedom. The United Nations
praised Estonia’s e-Annual Report system, which represents the annual reports submitted
electronically. The difference with
Estonia is that they were commended as the best of the best a-Government application
of the past decade. Estonia was even
ranked first in Interment freedom for the third year on a row. The United States and Germany placed second
and third).
Why was this recognition great deal of importance to
Estonia? Well Estonia is remembered from
their incident in April 2007 where they were the victims of the first known
target of politically motivated cyberattacks.
This attack flooded the Web sites of Estonia’s parliament, banks,
television stations and other organizations.
Even though the attacks back in 2007 may have seemed well
thought out and even sophisticated, they would be considered primitive to today’s
standards of attacks. Our vulnerabilities
are far greater now because of dependency on computing power and Information
Technology (IT).
However, the attacks proved positive outcomes for Estonia!
After the attacks, Estonia took cybersercurity seriously
earlier than most. It is no surprise
that cybersercurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone since almost
everything we do depends on a digitized system of one kind or another. This has proven to be true with the recent
cyber espionage with China and the United States. Understanding that cybersercurity means
defending the entirety of our societies, we should re-examine some assumptions
of security. An example of this is how in
our world it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense
forces. In this article it explains how a major cyberattack would be no different
than how a tornado or earthquake demonstrated a market failure. We forget how this can put a major halt to
many aspects of a society.
How can we provide and guarantee citizens with a secure
identity? It happens countless times where
you have a credit card number stolen or your name and identity. To me it seems fairly important to have a secure
online identification system.
In Estonia, the government has made sure that stealing identities
would be so easy. They use a two-fact
identification system in which an ID would be protected by both a chip and
password. So far this system has proven
to be secure.
Estonia has gone further than any other country in investing
in digitizing the basic processes of society. A quarter of the electorate votes
online; 95 percent of tax returns are done online, and 95 percent of
prescriptions are filled online. By the
end of 2012, Estonians gave more than a hundred million digital legal
signatures.
For the future, Estonia hopes to connect their digital service
and make them interoperable with their neighbors in Northern Europe.
“Cybersecurity is not just a matter of blocking bad things a
cyberattack can do; it is protecting all the good things that cyberinsecurity can prevent us from
doing. Genuine cybersecurity should not be seen as an additional cost, but as
an enabler, guarding our entire digital way of life.” – Toomas Hendrik Ilves
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/opinion/global/cybersecurity-a-view-from-the-front.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Melanie Maldonado
4/12/2013
4:38pm
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