INVITATION TO CYBERSECURITY 2. order for a person to rob the bank, the person needs to be in the physical proximity of the bank. Therefore, at any given moment, the number of people who pose an imminent threat to the bank is small. In fact, almost the entire human population is eliminated as a threat. However, if this bank allows online banking, the circumstances change dramatically. Now, not only can legitimate customers reach the bank at any time from anywhere in the world, but so can attackers. Now, every person on the Internet is a potential threat to the bank. These days, that includes almost the entire human population. Due to being online, this small Midwestern bank now has to worry about a variety of threat actors from all over the world. To make matters worse, the fact that cyberspace is a distanceless world increases social distance. Bad actors are removed from their victims not only physically but also psychologically. They do not witness the havoc they wreak on people’s lives. Because they do not see the devastation they cause, they can feel like they are committing victimless crimes. This diminishes the role of the conscience in inhibiting their behavior. Therefore, the fact that the Internet is a distanceless world increases the number of threat actors capable of attacking at any given moment, and it makes it easier for them to rationalize doing so. 1�2 Digital Cyberspace is also a digital world. We live in physical space, and our physical senses process the world on a continuous scale. Every physical thing is distinct upon close enough examination. A significant level of expertise is needed to convincingly impersonate another person or to create counterfeit objects. Most people do not possess the skills to do these types of things, and this makes many types of crimes rare in the real world. Additionally, objects in physical space have weight and mass—this, too, creates barriers to crime. But cyberspace is a digital world. It operates not on a continuous scale but on a discrete one, and the cyberspace scale is binary. This means that the cyberspace periodic table has only two elements: the 1 and the 0. All digital artifacts are composed of 1s and 0s, and it is trivially easy to perfectly replicate them. In fact, that is what we do every time we copy a file, load a webpage, or send an email. Unlike physical space where everything is unique, nothing in cyberspace is unique. This lowers the barriers to committing identity theft and makes it easy to create counterfeit websites and personas. And unlike physical space, digital artifacts have no weight or mass. Think again about the brick-and-mortar bank from the previous section. There is a significant physical aspect to robbing the bank. Cash has to be moved from the bank to someplace else. In general,
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