Evolving Cybersecurity Faces a New DawnSIGNAL Magazine column |
Over the last two years, we have been inundated with bad news about the state of cybersecurity. The list of concerns is growing and endless: rampant cybercrime, increasing identity theft, sophisticated social engineering techniques, relentless intrusions into government networks, and widespread vulnerabilities continuously exploited by a variety of entities ranging from criminal organizations and entrepreneurial hackers to well-resourced espionage actors. We also are facing the implications of cyberwarfare in light of last year’s cyber attacks against Estonia. In a recent speech on cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned, “We’ve entered an era of new threats and vulnerabilities,” and the consequences of failure are exponentially greater.
The stark reality is that the bad guys are winning and our nation is at risk. Given these difficult times, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and believe the situation is hopeless. However, I believe we are on the verge of a new dawn for cybersecurity, and in the coming months we will achieve significant progress in securing our critical networks. We have been on a four-stage journey that began in the late 1990s.
The first stage was ignorance. For the most part, up until 1998 we were clueless as to the vulnerable nature of our networks and the implications of interconnected systems. With the growth of the Internet and increasing dependence of military forces on networked systems as early as the 1991 Gulf War, we have rapidly leveraged the promise of net-centric capabilities. However, our understanding of the need for robust security mechanisms in this new environment was slow to catch up. As information technology boomed in the past two decades, the best young minds flocked to developing the latest and greatest systems — not to protecting data and corporate networks. But then, we entered stage two of the journey.
That second stage constituted awareness. It is no secret now that the Defense Department and other intelligence community members first became dramatically aware of our collective network vulnerabilities based on a series of exercises and actual events that occurred in the late 1990s. These events highlighted significant shortfalls in our cybersecurity posture that ultimately resulted in forerunners of today’s Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO), under the authority of U.S. Strategic Command. There is no doubt that JTF-GNO’s experiences in dealing with rampant cyber intrusions over the past three to four years have contributed greatly to focusing senior leadership attention throughout the federal government on this serious issue.
Read the rest of the article at SIGNAL online.
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