Expert Recommends Multi-Pronged Cybersecurity Strategy

By Cassie Williams Jones

In the wake of a series of high-profile cyber-attacks, Gurpreet Dhillon, Ph.D., professor of information systems in the VCU School of Business, suggests companies use several levels of controls to protect against online intruders.

Several prominent United States companies have fallen victim to a string of hacking attacks, raising concern of potentially more sophisticated attacks to come in the future. Just last week, Burger King and Jeep were targeted through their corporate Twitter accounts, and Apple’s Facebook account was taken over. In addition, recent news outlets released reports of a Chinese military unit hacking into 141 companies, mostly U.S. businesses.

Dhillon says access to proprietary information is much more readily available in our interconnected world and recommends an approach of several security layers involving multiple entities to address this, including technical controls, governance structures, ethical practices and international collaborations.

“Given the international nature of the impregnation and hacking attacks and cybersecurity threats that we have, some sort of international collaboration is required,” Dhillon said. “That kind of a regulatory mechanism needs to be put in place, and that currently is rather ill-defined. It’s only recently that we’re even thinking about it.

“If we can cooperate internationally to track down drug traffickers and money launderers and white collar criminals, then why can’t we have an international collaboration of sorts for cybercrime? We’re not doing that very well.”

According to Dhillon, research examining this type of criminal activity shows three primary reasons individuals would commit cybercrimes: personal factors, such as negative life events that may drive someone to criminal activity; opportunity, or having access to the information; or an unhappy work situation, in which a disgruntled employee maliciously sets out to damage his or her former or current employer.  

“Unfortunately, we do not train the new generation on how they should be using newer technologies. We teach them how to use them, but we don’t teach them how to use them responsibly,” he said. “This is like if we had given rather powerful cars to underage drivers.”


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