Last week we talked about personal information protection,
but what about the risk to national security?
In a world of crime it is always important to be one step
ahead of the bad guys, especially when it comes to cybercrime. It seems like in
the world of information systems, the next best thing came out yesterday. The
growth of these systems seems to be exponential! Traditional “large bodies”,
such as government are much slower when it comes to system upgrades compared to
an individual or group of individuals.
For example, the FBI is currently facing a national crisis
of constant information intrusion by foreign and domestic hackers. One of the
primary reasons? The government can’t keep up. FBI Director, James Comey,
interviewed with “60 minutes” this past Sunday and talked about his history
with cybercrime and the FBI’s growing pains over the years. “When I last left
government, my sense of us was kind of like four-year-old soccer. So like a
clump of four year olds chasing the ball, we were chasing it (cybercrime) in a
pack. We're about high school soccer now. We're spread out. We pass well. But
the bad guys are moving at World Cup speed. So we have to get better.”
Comey went on to explain the typical target of these hackers
as “Information that's useful to them so they don't have to invent. They can
copy or steal to learn about how a company might approach negotiations with a
Chinese company, all manner of things.” The FBI Director, sworn in during
September of 2013, recognizes the challenges of keeping his large body of
government up to speed with global hackers. His plan is to continually push for
funding and focus on getting all branches up to speed.
How far behind are some of these governmental branches? The Federal
Register is currently using floppy disks as one of its primary means of
storage! The Federal Register currently believes that USB’s are not a secure
way to pass along information and will hold off on modernization until funding
for a secure email system is granted.
Is there something to be said about the duty of our
government to provide cybercrime protection, similar to physical crime
protection? Consider this, if the police did not have the appropriate equipment
to stop a crime, what would be done? How long would it take to get that police
force adequately funded? Obviously a physical threat takes priority over the
virtual threat, but assets and intellectual property are at stake! Though some
may argue about a loss of privacy, I believe that the government as a whole
should make it a top priority to upgrade their systems on a more frequent basis
to better monitor illegal internet activity. Progress has been made within the
FBI, but it is of the utmost importance that this gap between “good and evil”
is actively reduced. It will be expensive and it will be a nuisance, but we
need to keep up with the Johnson’s of this world before they are out of reach
all together.
Andrew Miller
Andrew Miller
60 Minutes – James Comey
Floppy Disks
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/us/politics/slowly-they-modernize-a-federal-agency-that-still-uses-floppy-disks.html
