Cybersecurity Report Stresses Need for Cooperation
A lack of honest information-sharing between public and private sectors and among nations hampers cyber defenses, warns a new report by McAfee and the Brussels-based Security and Defense Agenda.
Mon, January 30, 2012
CIO — WASHINGTON — As they grapple with a growing crop of increasingly sophisticated threats that know no political borders, nations must dramatically improve their framework for coordinating on cybersecurity policy and preventing and responding to attacks, according to a new study sponsored by security software vendor McAfee.
McAfee commissioned the Security and Defense Agenda (SDA), a prominent think tank based in Brussels, to canvas global leaders and cybersecurity experts for the report entitled, "Cybersecurity: The Vexed Question of Global Rules," released at an event here on Monday.
The authors of the report emphasized the need for sharing information about threats in real time, both among nations around the globe and between the public and private sectors in any given country.
Some 57 percent of the leaders and experts polled said they believe the world is in the midst of a cyber arms race, and 36 percent said that cybersecurity should rank as a higher priority than missile defense programs.
Those findings underscore the new reality that cyber operations, both offensive and defensive, play an increasingly central role in virtually every modern military and intelligence operation, even if the sort of full-on electronic warfare that could knock out a regional electric grid or telecommunications system has yet to transpire.
Under Cyber Assault
"We're not in cyber wars today but all of the nations that were surveryed feel that they're under assault from a significant campaign of cyber espionage," said Stewart Baker, a partner with the law firm of Steptoe and Johnson who served as assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under the George W. Bush administration.
"People recognize it isn't happening now, but the attackers who are engaged in cyber espionage are so effective that it's obvious that if they chose to they could turn to having the equivalent of kinetic effects without too much difficulty, and consequently, for most countries, the prospect of cyber war is very real but has not yet eventuated," Baker said.
The authors of the report evaluated the level of cyber readiness in 23 countries based on a methodology developed by Robert Lentz, the president and CEO of the consultancy Cyber Security Strategies and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense. Lentz's model is a five-step roadmap that evaluates the relative maturity of the cyber defenses of a government or business, with the ultimate goal of reaching a high level of resilience.
No country the researchers evaluated merited a score of five, though three—Finland, Israel and Sweden—received a four-and-a-half. The United States, along with several European nations, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, earned a four.
