By Michael Balboni
In an op-ed for Newsday, I examined Secretary Napolitano’s announcement of a National Strategy for Supply Chain Security, noting that it only mentioned the importance of physical security. Surprisingly, cyber threats were left completely off the table, though it is crucial to recognize that both these threats are actually inexorably intertwined.
Security Debrief contributor Steve Bucci spoke to Federal News Radio’s Francis Rose about things to watch in the cyber realm in 2012. Check out Steve’s interview on In Depth with Francis Rose to learn more about progress in deciphering Stuxnet an Duqu, as well as cloud computing and other cyber issues.
It was a busy year in cyber, and there were a lot of interesting developments. From Stuxnet to social media revolution in the Middle East to smart grid security, 2011 was a challenging year. Looking ahead, we need to continue securing our networks and developing awareness and education programs.
The Israeli media has been awash in reports of an alleged Saudi hacker that goes by the online name of OxOmar and has posted the credit card information, national ID numbers and addresses of thousands of Israelis. According to recent reports, that person may turn out to be nineteen-year-old Omar Habib, who resides in Mexico. Some others, though less convincingly, have alleged that the origin of the attack lies in Iran. Ultimately, the origin and motivations of the cyber attack are less interesting than the nature of the vulnerability that it exposes.
I have opined on the growing threat to the security of mobile computing before. Most people use some sort of mobile device, but how many of them do you think have security measures loaded on them, or even have passwords? We need to get people cognizant of their mobile security requirements, so they stop “walking about naked” from a technological stand point.
CQ Homeland Security In the final weeks before Congress is expected to conclude its business for the year, nine lawmakers, including House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King, announced a new a cybersecurity bill aimed at protecting critical infrastructure.
America’s intelligence community finds itself pressed to deal with the “Wild West” frontier of an ever-expanding cyber space. From Twitter to blogs to e-mail, the changes are coming hard and fast for governments, businesses and individuals worldwide. The challenges for the American policy maker and the intelligence community are simple and yet hugely complex. So far, by our own admission, we appear not to be passing the grade.
One of the keynote speakers at last week’s Cyber Conference at the Walter Washington Center was Ed Amoroso, the CTO of AT&T. Ed is brilliant, well spoken, and as funny as any speaker I have heard lately. He also has a practical and accurate view of the challenges we are facing in the cyber realm – including LAN protection, botnets and mobile security. He raised lots of great issues and challenged the audience to work out the solutions.
Following the recent attention given to the water sector’s vulnerability to cyber intrusion, there’s been a lot of talk about what went wrong, whose fault it was and why changes need to be made in the sector. However, the challenge in addressing the water sector’s cyber security posture isn’t in outlining existing problems, but rather in generating realistic, affordable and timely solutions to mitigate them. My concern is that we may just keep talking about the problem without actually doing anything about it.
DailyTech – New Bill Urges U.S. Intelligence Agencies to Share Cyber Threat Info with Private Sector Members of the U.S. House intelligence committee have proposed a bill that would allow private firms to receive cyber threat-related information from government agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA).
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