Eric Lieberman on June 9, 2016 at the Daily Caller News Foundation

A new comprehensive report published Wednesday puts America as the 14th most vulnerable country to cybersecurity terrorism. Rapid7, an information technology security and analytics company, conducted the study on 50 nations around the world. Pakistan ranks 30 spots higher than the United States.

The intention of IT firm’s study was to create a “National Exposure Index” that can outline how susceptible certain countries are to cybersecurity attacks. Tod Beardsley, one of the three authors of the report, wants to conduct this study on a regular basis as the internet of things has become so pervasive in global society.

“The first part of the study establishes–through empirical methodology–that there is, in fact, a relationship between a country’s economic strength and the quantity of discoverable services hosted on the internet”, the report reads.

The internet has become an integral component for a country’s economic growth, so Rapid7 “hypothesized that countries with higher GDP might have higher utilization of IP address space.”

The analyses revealed a linear correlation between internet services and GDP, but “with the ‘outliers’ of the United States, China and India adding some uncertainty.” However, these correlations doesn’t prove causation because increasing GDP cannot merely be solved by additional internet services and the report was a “single point-in-time study”, hence why Beardsley wants to organize future investigations. Factors like infrastructure, levels of education, commerce and other intangibles also play a substantial role.

The second hypothesis deduced that encrypted versus unencrypted services “all speak to a fundamental failure in modern internet engineering …Virtually every security company and security advocacy organization on Earth” has made it absolutely clear that compulsory encryption should be a default, but in most nations, like the United States, it is not.

Cyber experts told the Research and Technology, and Oversight subcommittees in January that hackers are and will continue to threaten the federal government’s critical network systems. A year after the massive Office of Personnel Management breach in 2015, “cybersecurity executives say the government isn’t doing any better protecting sensitive information” and that their “Cybersecurity Sprint program…didn’t improve information system safety.”

The United States’ weak cybersecurity vulnerability rankings exemplify this fact, because according to the conclusion by Rapid7, “this state of affairs cannot last for much longer without dire consequences for the world’s largest economies.”