Someone I know recently sent me a Washington Post article about some proposed U.S. federal regulations on cybersecurity. The article was an attempt at fear-mongering over privacy concerns. As a cybersecurity professional and author on twenty books on cybersecurity and the technology of data communications, I’m qualified to comment on this article.
Federal regulation on cybersecurity is LONG overdue. Today, almost all of the 50 states have enacted cybersecurity laws, each different, most designed to protect the privacy of citizen data, and none of these state laws go nearly far enough to deal with the blatant irresponsibility on the part of many private corporations on protecting citizens’ data. The scourge of security breaches (such as the recent Heartland heist of ONE HUNDRED MILLION credit card numbers) are, in part, still occurring because private corporations are not doing enough to protect OUR DATA.
My most recent book on cybersecurity, which is to be published in May, opens in this way:
“If the Internet were a city street, I would not travel it in daylight,” laments a chief information security officer for a prestigious university.
The Internet is critical infrastructure for the world’s commerce. Cybercrime is escalating; once the domain of hackers and script kiddies, cyber-gangs and organized criminal organizations have discovered the business opportunities for extortion, embezzlement, and fraud that now surpasses income from illegal drug trafficking. Criminals are going for the gold, the information held in information systems that are often easily accessed anonymously from the Internet.
The information security industry is barely able to keep up. Cybercriminals and hackers always seem to be one step ahead, and new threats and vulnerabilities crop up at a rate that often exceeds our ability to continue protecting our most vital information and systems. Like other sectors in IT, security planners, analysts, engineers, and operators are expected to do more with less. Cybercriminals have never had it so good.
There are not enough good security professionals to go around. As a profession, information security in all its forms is relatively new. Fifty years ago there were perhaps a dozen information security professionals, and their jobs consisted primarily of making sure the doors were locked and that keys were issued only to personnel who had an established need for access. Today, whole sectors of commerce are doing virtually all of their business online, and other critical infrastructures such as public utilities are controlled online via the Internet. It’s hard to find something that’s not online these days. The rate of growth in the information security profession is falling way behind the rate of growth of critical information and infrastructures going online. This is making it all the more critical for today’s and tomorrow’s information security professionals to have a good understanding of the vast array of principles, practices, technologies, and tactics that are required to protect an organization’s assets.
What I have not mentioned in the book’s opening pages is that cybersecurity laws are inadequate. The security incidents of the recent past (and short-term future, I fear) are so severe that they may pose a far greater threat on our economy than the worldwide recession.
Case in point: considerable intelligence suggests that the likely culprit for the great Northeast Blackout of 2003 was not electric power system malfunctions, but computer hackers who are sponsored by the People’s Republic of China. I have read some of the intelligence reports myself and they are highly credible. You can read a lengthy article in the National Journal about the outage here. A few years ago, I attended a confidential briefing by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence on state-sponsored Chinese hackers. The briefing described many cyberterrorism activities in details that I cannot describe here. I believe that the capabilities by those groups are probably far greater today than they were at the time of the briefing. The fact that these groups’ efforts have been so successful is because U.S. private companies are not required to adequately security their networks; they are not even required to disclose whether security incidents have occurred (except as required by a patchwork of U.S. state laws).
I do not know whether the specific legislation discussed in the Washington Post article is an attempt to federalize the laws present in many U.S. states, or whether this legislation has a different purpose.
Security standards that are enforceable by the rule of law are badly needed. No, they will not solve all of our cybersecurity problems overnight, but if crafted correctly they can be an important first step. Today we have good standards, but no private company is required to follow them. The result is lax security that leads to the epidemic of cybersecurity incidents, many of which you never hear about.
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Peter H. Gregory 