Cyber threats can compromise the privacy, accuracy or availability of digital information and services.
Malicious software, designed to cause harm, makes a training provider's registration files unavailable. Staff cannot confirm course places even though investigators have not found evidence that anyone copied the files. Disruption is a security harm as well as data theft.
Cyber threats are potential harmful actions against digital systems or data. They include unauthorised access, theft or alteration of information, and disruption of services. A threat can exist before a successful attack occurs.
Connected systems let people and organisations work across borders, but can also allow attacks to reach distant victims. Reliance on shared platforms can spread disruption across several users or countries. A server is a computer or system that stores data or runs a digital service. Its location alone does not identify the attacker or their nationality.
An outage, when a service is unavailable, may have a technical cause rather than an attacker, so the cause needs evidence. Cybercrime is also not automatically terrorism: stealing money or data does not by itself establish an intention to intimidate society for political or ideological aims.
Worked example: An attack blocks access to records
A training provider uses a registration service hosted abroad. Investigators confirm that malicious software has blocked staff access to its files. Registration stops for a day while the service is safely restored. No copied data has been detected.
- The confirmed malicious interference supports describing this as a cyberattack, rather than assuming that every outage is an attack.
- The immediate harm is lost access to information and a disrupted service. Data theft is not required for a cyberattack to cause harm.
- Dependence on an overseas service helps explain why a problem elsewhere affects the local provider.
- No copied data has been detected, so do not claim that theft occurred. Hosting abroad also does not establish who carried out the attack.
Watch out for this
A cyberattack has caused no harm if no personal data was stolen.
Check whether data was changed or services became unavailable. Lost access or inaccurate records can cause harm even when theft has not been established.
Check your understanding
An investigation finds that someone altered a company's delivery records without permission, causing parcels to go to wrong addresses. No data theft was detected. What is supported?
- Unauthorised changes compromised the accuracy of the records and affected the service.
- There was no security problem because the records were not copied.
- The incident must be terrorism because computers were involved.