Biggest Cyber Attack in History. Cybersecurity Pioneer Narus Asks: "Are You Safe?"

It's funny how things work. Earlier this week I was interviewing the team at Narus. The company, an independent subsidiary of Boeing and more about digital, less about massive bodies of steel,  is a pioneer in cybersecurity. Cybersecurity, the practices designed to protect networks, computers, programs and data from attack or damage.
I was asking the company's president, John Trobough, "As a consumer, why should I care?" I mean, these big companies have money to throw at this kind of stuff, so I'm sure they've figured it out. Besides, what do I care if some chicken nugget-producing enterprise gets hacked? Or if some big bucks mobile company has a security breech when a clever employee outsources his work and watches cat videos instead? Some of those videos are pretty good.
The very next day the world sustained what many touted as being the "biggest cyber attack in history."

It was, if fact, big. Mashable writes, "Kaspersky Labs, a leading security research group, called it 'one of the largest DDoS operations to date.'" It's origins were a conflict between Spamhaus, a European organization that keeps tabs on spammers and Cyberbunker, a Dutch hosting company accused of housing them. In the end, the attack severely affected the websites it was targeted at, and many Internet users in Europe and North America found the Internet suddenly slowed or ground to a halt.
On the whole, though, the global Internet as a whole was not impacted to the expected extent. You see, it's not necessarily a "massive," global cyber attack that we, as individuals should be concerned about. It's the potential smaller, personal ones. As a 2012 Norton Cybercrime report outlines, these consumer attacks are costing us.
"We are living in an interconnected world where lines are being blurred, from the personal to the digital," Narus' Trobough explains. "As consumers, we expect the same level of security in our digital world we've always had in our physical world."
In fact, the guarantees aren't the same.
A recent Financial Times article points to a new study that suggests automobiles could one day become the victim of cyber attacks that compromise electronic systems and endanger passenger safety. Cars already contain a huge amount of electronics controlled by thousands of lines of code, and mobile phones, internet access, Bluetooth connections all open doors for hackers. The risk to consumers is more than compromised performance or someone stealing your Twitter account; a cyber attack on a car could result in the loss of life.