Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on ways to improve cyber security, clearly an important issue in 2009. Just how important is it? Consider these two things:
1.) The New York Times' Bits Blog reported yesterday that on April 1, the Conficker virus--which resides quietly on as many as 12 million computers worldwide--is set to activate on April 1. And the scariest part? No one is quite sure what it will do:
Speculation about Conficker's purpose ranges from the benign -- an April Fool's Day prank -- to far darker notions. [...] Conficker's authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible. Or perhaps the Conficker botnet's masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, University of California at San Diego computer scientist Stefan Savage, has suggested the idea of a "Dark Google." What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers?
2.) The FBI recently estimated that cyber-crime has now replaced drug trafficking as the most lucrative global crime. The agency estimates that cyber crime is now pulling in over $1 trillion a year in profits.
At yesterday's hearing, Edward Amoroso, senior vice president and chief security officer at A+L member-company AT&T described how cyber attacks can "devastate infrastructure," and offered the committee a few ideas on how to combat the problem:
We believe that the public and private sectors can and should create structures for timely and secure sharing of cyber-security threat and response information between government and industry, and between and among critical infrastructures in a trusted, collaborative environment. [...] Perhaps most importantly, the government should collaborate with industry on research and development efforts in pursuit of critical cyber-security capabilities, and in furtherance of interoperable identity management processes between government and the private sector.
It should come as no surprise that these solutions rely on collaboration both within the industry and between industry and government. We're all a part of the same global network, and solutions to the problems we face from cyber crime--whether it's malware, piracy, SPAM, phishing, or any other threat--will require collaboration, coordination, and implementation on a truly global scale.
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