BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Cyber-attacks are constantly making headlines, putting countries, industries, and businesses at danger of security breaches. With society's reliance on technology and the introduction of the internet, things could get even worse. Cyber criminals are growing more smart and knowledgeable, as seen by the fatal software they use to attack businesses. In the year 2020, hackers used stealthy malware to infiltrate Solar breezes (a United States-based firm that provides network monitoring and other technical services to thousands of companies, including government agencies), and injected malicious code to the firm's software system. Companies utilize the Orion system to manage their information technology resources (Mohsin, 2006). The code provided a backdoor into the customer information technology system, which hackers used to spy on businesses, organizations, and government agencies. Because critical information is exposed to the hackers, a hack of this magnitude has a global impact on information on healthcare, the electricity grid, disease management, and military operations that might be used to destroy a country.
Users of cyberspace have continued to utilize the internet to conduct crimes, eliciting conflicting emotions of admiration and terror among the general public, as well as increasing concern about the status of cyber and personal security. This problem has lately become more complex and exceptional, necessitating a fast reaction in enacting legislation to safeguard the cyber realm and its users. Y ears ago, a cyber murder was perpetrated in the United States. According to the Indian Express, in January 2002, an underworld don was scheduled to have minor surgery at a hospital. His competitor went on to hire a computer specialist who hacked the hospital's computer system and changed his prescriptions. An unsuspecting nurse gave him the tampered medication, which resulted in the patient's death (Mohsin, 2006).
In 2016, BT, the telecoms company that owns and maintains the physical infrastructure that makes up the UK's broadband network, experienced an outage of a portion of its broadband services, causing hundreds of thousands of customers (including businesses) to lose Internet and phone connections for approximately two hours (Williams, 2016). This was the largest and most extensive network breakdown in years, according to the news item. Despite the fact that the corporation denies it and blames the network outage on a malfunctioning router, it has been speculated that the outage was caused by a cyber-attack. Whether BT's explanation for the outage (a malfunctioning router) is correct, the point is that it is definitely feasible to conduct a cyber-attack that may bring an organization's infrastructure down. What if this was a cyber-attack that affected more routers and lasted days rather than hours? For instance, the devastating effects on the country's economy, not to mention the lives lost when emergency services lost communication? On October 19, 2020, IBM researchers discovered Vizom, a new type of stealthy malware that targets Brazilian account holders using remote overlay assaults according to Guillermo (2014) as cited in Brewer (2015). It is currently being used in a campaign in Brazil that aims to compromise bank accounts through online financial services. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Vizom poses as a popular video conferencing software, which is now critical to businesses and social life (Brewer, 2015). The problem with such attacks is that they can eventually lead to a cascading failure of inter-bank funding, triggering a tipping point for a broader systemic liquidity crisis. In both of these scenarios, the organizations' operations are so intertwined with other organizations in their respective countries that their failure will inevitably trigger a domino effect, causing these other or related organizations to fail. As a result, the safeguarding of such infrastructures, also known as critical information infrastructures, is seen as a national security issue.
How does one protect against such assaults? Is big data analytics the way to go? We've seen a significant rise in data volume over the previous few years. Global IP traffic reached an estimated 1.2 zettabytes in 2016, according to Cisco Systems. Global IP traffic refers to all digital data that travels over an IP network; it is expected to exceed 20 zettabytes by the end of 2021 (Williams, 2016). Data is collected from a variety of sources, including contracts, call centers, social media, and phones. Interactions between faxes, for example. This data could be very useful in detecting fraud.
Big data analytics, according to Abdullah (2019), is the act of studying enormous data sets encompassing a variety of data types in order to find patterns, market trends, and consumer behavior. Organizations are embracing big data analytics solutions because the information gleaned from market trends and customer behavior is extremely beneficial in defending against cyber-attacks and driving overall corporate success. If this data is used well, it has the potential to make a significant difference.
Antivirus applications, network IDS/IPS, host IDS/IPS, network device events, logging, FIM and whitelisting, and SIEM are the traditional categories for detecting and stopping cyber-attacks. Although these technologies are beneficial in many respects, they are mainly ineffectual against today's covert cyber-attacks. This is because, in addition to working autonomously, these systems create a large volume of data that is difficult and time consuming to analyze without the right tool; as a result, it is possible to overlook crucial cyber-attack occurrences (Shackleford, 2016).
This shows that these disparate systems may be made more efficient and successful with the proper deployment of the relevant tool (such as BDA technology), which can filter through data considerably faster. According to Krishnan (2016), an organization that used to employ roughly 35 people to monitor 135,000 data loss prevention (DLP) alerts each day was able to lower that number significantly by adopting a big data analytics solution.
Large corporations are increasingly using big data analytics for cyber-security and defense because it allows them to see bigger and clearer pictures when detecting threats. As a result, a study of the role of big data analytics – for cyber-attack detection will be conducted in this research. This would be done by looking at the success rate of employing the technology to detect sophisticated and stealthy cyber-attacks like Advance Persistent Threats (through a survey by questionnaire) given that stealthy malware is designed to go undetected and that an attack can compromise a computer system in seconds (Brewer, 2015).
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The internet is a global network of interconnected systems which serves billions of users worldwide. Its popularity and rapid growth have come at an expensive cost, i.e., loss of information and resources due to cyber threats and attacks. The first cyber crime was reported in 2000 and infected almost 45 million internet users (Message Labs Intelligence, 2010) cited in Brewer (2015).
Over the few past years cybercrimes have increased rapidly with cyber criminals continuously exploring new ways to circumvent security solutions to get illegal access to computer systems and networks. Some important cyber attacks includes spamming, Search Poisoning, Botnets, Denial of Service (DoS), Phishing, Malware, hacking, etc
The Importance of protecting Critical Information Infrastructure cannot be overemphasized due to the catastrophic nature of such attacks to governments, attacks of such manner can be devastating and lead to a domino effect of disaster. This cyber-attacks often disguises in form of stealthy malware in attacking critical information sectors such as defense, food and agriculture, financial services, oil and gas, public health care, transportation etc. either to steal information or disrupt the normal operations of a government.
The extensive damage caused by these cyber attacks has lead to the design and implementation of cybersecurity systems. Cybersecurity refers to the techniques, processes and methodologies that are concerned with thwarting illegal or dishonest cyber attacks such as hacking, spamming, SQL injection, etc in order to protect one or more computers on any type of network from any type of damage.
This research proposes to address how critical information infrastructure can be protected against cyber-attacks using big data analytics.
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