“It doesn’t matter how you define cyberwar,” says Amit Yoran
Amit Yoran
A central debate in recent months has been over the issue of cyber warfare and whether or not one is occurring presently. Mike McConnell, currently of Booz Allen and former DNI, wrote an article in the Washington Post in which he said that the U.S. was currently engaged in a cyber war and was losing. In an interview with The New New Internet, author Jeff Carr discussed some of the difficulties in defining cyber warfare. During his speech at the recent RSA conference, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, Howard Schmidt, stated emphatically that the U.S. was not presently in a cyber war.
Amit Yoran, CEO of NetWitness, has now joined the debate. In an article published in Forbes, Yoran looks to provide a bit more perspective to both parties involved in the debate. For Yoran, “it doesn’t matter how you define cyberwar or whether you believe we are currently at a state of cyberwar or not.”
Instead of focusing on this issue, Yoran believes that the focus should be on cybersecurity as not just a national security issue, but also an economic issue. Millions of dollars is stolen from the United States each month by cyber criminals.
According to Gary Warner, the director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Just one of the Zeus controllers steals about $10 million a week from the United States.”
“At its core, cybersecurity must be dealt with as key international economic issue and not simply a national defense or security one,” Yoran writes. “The impact of misrepresenting or miscalculating risk was felt in the sub-prime market and cascading global financial meltdown. Today’s cybersecurity challenges and implications are more pervasive.”
Instead of concentrating on defining what cyber war is, Yoran writes that it is necessary to act now to secure U.S. networks.
“What does matter, is largely agreed upon – modern society has failed to understand and measure the risks associated with cyber and also to develop and deploy the protections necessary to operate safely online,” he writes. “While definitions matter, the time for action is now.”
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