A Cyber World War I?

Drawing near is an unfortunate centennial, one which might not be immediately apparent to many these days.  Nevertheless, its significance far outweighs the familiarity, an event which sent violent echoes of change radiating around the globe.  Just outside Schiller’s delicatessen, with a car in a motorcade backing up in order to take the route to the hospital, a man stepped forward and shortly thereafter the Archduke of Austria-Hungary and his wife were dead.  That was June 28, 1914, and I don’t need to tell you what happened next.  Justlook to Hemingway if you forget the effect the so called “Great War” had on an entire generation.

I don’t much go for sensationalistic questions—Ironic, since I sometimes have to conjure up sensationalistic headlines.  A question, then, like “Are we in a cyber World War I?” initially tempts a flippant dismissal, and yet a serious issue, as cyber crime is, deserves a closer examination.

Now, as Kevin Coleman points out, there has yet been no reported loss of life from cyber attacks, which would be a reasonable line in the sand that had to be crossed before even thinking about classifying such an instance as an “act of war.”  And yet, the numbers don’t lie.  Over 2,000 reported breaches in 2013 that exposed over 822 million records, 30 million new types of malware, about 3 new cyber attacks per second, $1 trillion lost in 2013.  Big money, that; with such sums involved, I’m actually a bit amazed we’re still discussing this as merely a future scenario.  Regardless, one imagines all it would take would be the wrong critical infrastructure hacked at the wrong time, or the wrong person’s information nabbed; again, fortunately, this has never been the case.

When it comes to such an important issue of national security, every effort should be attempted to bolster one’s security.  So if the new trend truly is “detection is the new prevention,” it’s a misguided one.  Doctors don’t simply detect viruses; nor, as Mr. Brennan indicates, does your immune system.  Prevention needs to be the primary focus, especially with issues heating up on the international cyber crime stage, thanks to that indictment of the five officers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army by the US Department of Justice.

Frankly, I think humanity as a whole should be proud that no loss of life has yet occurred from any cyber malfeasance.  And although the number of data thefts and related crimes continues to mount, let’s keep it that way.

Written by Jonathan Weicher

http://www.netlib.com/blog/application-security/A-Cyber-World-War-I.asp