BW #79: Cyber attacks
Several years ago, I read David Sanger's book, "The Perfect Weapon," about cyber attacks – that is, attacks against the Internet and computer infrastructure. The book was equally enlightening and terrifying, and I highly recommend it. The main thesis was that causing destruction and mayhem no longer takes huge budgets. A government or terrorist group can assemble and train a set of attackers for very little money. And democracies provide such attackers with many options
We've been hearing quite a bit about cyber security (and cyber attacks) in the last few weeks. There was the Russian illegal entry into Microsoft's systems (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/tech/microsoft-russia-hack/index.html). There was the hack of the Donald Trump's campaign, which seems to have come from Iran. A NY Times story (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/us/politics/trump-campaign-hacking-iran.html?unlocked_article_code=1.C04.wwrD.02yxkx89ZYzT&smid=url-share) on the subject was written by David Sanger, who wrote the book I mentioned above.
And then there was the CrowdStrike bug several weeks ago, which was ironically caused by software meant to prevent cyber attacks. A problematic upgrade ended up grounding airlines and shutting down medical facilities, among many other things.
Earlier this week, we heard about another cyber attack, one that Elon Musk blamed for the delayed start of his conversation with Donald Trump. There was no proof of this attack; it seems far more likely that X's technology was just not up to the task.
How often do cyber attacks take place? Who initiates them, who is targeted by them, and have they been increasing over time? I thought that it would be interesting to investigate this topic this week.
Data and six questions
This week's data set comes from the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (https://cissm.umd.edu/). They have a database of cyber attacks dating back to 2014. You can download it from here:
https://cissm.umd.edu/research-impact/publications/cyber-events-database-home
Click on the link "publication file" on the right side of the screen, and you'll get an Excel file containing their database.
This week, I have six tasks and questions for you. The learning goals include working with dates and times, grouping, pivot tables, plotting, and string methods.
As always, I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions and explanations.
- Read the data into an Excel file. Make sure that the
event_datecolumn into a datetime dtype. - Create a line plot showing the number of incidents in each month. Has the number of incidents grown consistently over time?
