Diversity and Commonality
Majorly national infrastructure protection highlights significant challenges that are present when protecting national infrastructures from botnet and other cyber-attacks using advanced security mechanisms set to protect less complex environments. Currently, most national foundations that are significant to daily communication, entertainment, and trade seem to be highly susceptible to botnets threats since its possible for botnets to attack several computers in a short time. According to a recent New York Times report, it’s clear that there is a rapid growth of attacks by botnets suggesting that cybersecurity of most national infrastructure such as EnergyA faces serious cyber-attacks.
To prevent continuous botnets attacks, a security mechanism that involves Diversity and Commonality concepts are put in place to eliminate and deter state infrastructure’s operating system attack. Diversity as a concept entails upholding multiplicity in different aspects such as services, technologies, and products that enable organizations like EnergyA to limit the chances of malicious botnet attacks.
Diversity of different computer operating systems that involves the implementation of various security mechanisms such as the use of firewalls and VPNs is beneficial when preventing botnet attack on EnergyA organization. Diversity implementation on the EnergyA organization operating system enables the containment of malicious botnet attacks and other viruses and worms. The diversity containment evaluates the possible flaws and weaknesses present in the Windows operating system of the organization. Thus, the application of different or alternative operating systems enhances the continuous containment of malicious botnet attacks, which seem to spread to other computers in the EnergyA organization.
For instance, diversification in terms of organization’s operating systems forces leading companies like Microsoft to push so hard on meeting the appropriate security necessities of their esteemed customers. Additionally, diversity helps speed up several innovations whereby operating systems professionals work towards developing the operating system to match advanced methods such as windows. Due to heterogeneity, these inventions entail steady security operating systems that inhibit malicious botnet attacks from instilling damage to computer operating systems.
In contrast, the commonality implementation of the EnergyA organization also presents different strategies for preventing botnet and other malware attacks. However, commonality application in organizations does not suffer too much cost during any botnet attack since all the computers in the organization use the same operating systems. Similar and conventional operating systems in an organization are more flexible and straightforward, enabling system developers to stop botnet attacks with ease.
Commonality and Diversity concept is very paradoxical despite both performing the same function. Diversity requires a massive program of several operating systems to achieve the desired degree of variety, which is very costly and tough to an organization because it’s against cost-motivated technology initiative. At the same time, commonality employs everyday use of operating systems to different computers in a less expensive organization.
Implementation of both commonality and diversity in an organization faces different challenges, such as an organization incurring extra operational costs. Diversity employs the use of a different operating system that is very expensive for most organizations. Also, operating system compatibility is a challenge since an organization may fail to be compatible with a specific concept.
References
Ng, G. Y. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,253,203. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Rodriguez, M., Kwiat, K. A., & Kamhoua, C. A. (2015, October). Modeling fault-tolerant architectures with design diversity for secure systems. In MILCOM 2015-2015 IEEE Military Communications Conference (pp. 1254-1263). IEEE.