No shortage of work after cyberworkshop

March 30th, 2009 | Uncategorized | Posted by Ben Iannotta

 

It’s easy to see what people mean when they say U.S. cybersecurity capabilities are in a sorry state.

The country is very much at the beginning of understanding this threat and how to defend against it, according to panelists at a March 30 workshop held by Air Force Space Command.

For starters, there is no standard terminology across the industry and government about what exactly is meant by such terms as cyberattack and cyberthreat.

Even the term “data theft,” which sounds easy enough to understand, is a misnomer according to Eric Cole, chief scientist at Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services, and a member of the Obama administration’s cyber security commission. Really, the term should be “data copying,” which is actually  a lot worse than out right theft, he said. The intruder wants to copy your data and do it stealthily, so you never know that your defense plans have been compromised until you try to use them.

How much work lies ahead? “We can’t even name all of the connection points that the government has to the Internet,” said Cole.

He then listed five prerequisites for establishing secure networks: a security policy; dollars; a team;  a firewall; and an alert system.

One piece of good news, sort of, is that the more a network is probed or pinged by an enemy, the more secure U.S. software engineers ought to be able to make the network.

“We look at the body’s immune system as an example here,” said Kamal Jabbour, senior scientist for information assurance at the Air Force Research Laboratory office in Rome, N.Y.

Tags: Air Force, cybersecurity, space command

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