Inside The National Infrastructure
Marvin Phillips Jr.
Professor David Belva
SEC 310 Homeland Security Organization and Administration
2/4/2013

A computer attack may be defined as actions directed against computer systems to disrupt equipment operations, change processing control, or corrupt stored data. Different attack methods target different vulnerabilities and involve different types of weapons, and several may be within the current capabilities of some hacker groups. A general overview of these attacks can be categorized into a physical, electronic, or computer network attack. These attacks could actually prove more damaging because they involve disruptive technologies that might generate unpredictable consequences or give an adversary unexpected advantage. A physical attack involves conventional weapons directed against a computer facility or its transmission lines and can cause much damage to the infrastructure of our company. For an electronic attack it uses the power of electromagnetic energy as a weapon, but more commonly as an electromagnetic pulse to overload computer circuitry in a less violent form in order to insert a stream of malicious digital code directly into an enemy radio transmission. Finally, for a computer network attack this usually involves malicious code used as a weapon to infect enemy computers so that it can exploit a weakness in software in system configuration or in the computer security practices of an organization.
It will be of interest to information resource managers, computer security officials, and administrators, and of particular value to those trying to establish computer security policies. In order to deal with the risk factor, security administrators need to decide how much time, money, and effort needs to be spent in order to develop the appropriate security policies and controls. “Each organization