Danielle,

Cyber Security is a very important part of our infrastructure. If you think about all the different parts of our infrastructure most of it is now some part of technology that can get hacked. If you think about everything you do in one day and see how much of your life is on the internet or can have access to the internet it scares me to think of a major cyber-attack. The terrorists have been known to get smarter and use the internet for multiple numbers of things including, training, recruiting, and even executing attacks, which makes our infrastructure that is online vulnerable to these such attacks. It’s not just terrorists that we need to be aware of, there are plenty of hackers out there that just want to get information on people that would better their lives like their identity or their money.

I personally have been a victim of identity theft twice. Luckily, I caught it before any damage was truly done and the bank had given me my money back very quickly. There are some people out there that have their lives turned upside down and take years to recover from identity theft. Now if we think of the United States as a person and then think that their identity got stolen that would be our whole National security at jeopardy of getting into the wrong hands. If this were to happen then we would have a devastating problem on our hands.

When it comes to national preparedness, I think there is not enough training. There is a lot of training in the military and other government agencies but for the civilians that work in affected areas or even the people that don’t work and just live in areas that are likely to have natural disasters hit their area need more training and education on how to be safe. I think there are a lot of people out there that believe they can ride the storm until they can’t. I want to see more involvement in the communities that are subject to hurricanes and tornados and the cities that are on fault lines of earthquakes. I know you can’t make people do the training or make it mandatory, but they need to know what could happen. There needs to be more information that is in simple terms for these citizens to understand how dangerous some of these natural threats can be.