What the presidential contenders are missing about cyber security

(Cyberwar.news) In the most recent GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wis., Nov. 10, the issue of cyber security was barely mentioned. While some may argue that’s because the debate was supposed to be focused primarily on economic issues, the threat that cyber attacks pose to the nation’s financial infrastructure is dire, according to federal technology publication FCW.

What’s more, the publication noted, when the issue of cyber security did come up candidates tended to toss out applause lines rather than solid, believable solutions to what has become the most dangerous threat to all information systems in the 21^st century:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich made a passing reference to conducting retributive cyberattacks on China, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pledged to hit China hard after years of Chinese hacking of U.S. organizations.

“If the Chinese commit cyber warfare against us, they are going to see cyber warfare like they have never seen before,” Christie promised.

Christie also proposed a strategy around which others have coalesced: Hack Chinese government systems and then post the information publicly so that the Chinese people can see it.

“That is a closed society in China, where they’re hiding information from their own people,” Christie said. “Real fun in Beijing when we start showing them how [the Chinese government is] spending their money in China.”

True enough, but as FCW noted, some cyber experts have said that vindictive retaliatory attacks could wind up being either ineffective or mechanisms justifying further attacks against American systems. And besides, they note, Bejing is not the only country that possesses sophisticated hacking capabilities.

“Never, ever stoke the bear,” warned Johannes Hoech, chief marketing officer at Identity Finder and former WhiteHat Security executive. [See also: ‘Why don’t we hit them back?’]

“This is not World War II, where you can drop a nuclear bomb and it’s over,” Hoech told FCW, calling Kasich’s and Christie’s comments “electioneering grandstanding” that does not show any real understanding of cybersecurity threats. “If you think that the way to handle cybersecurity is to go on the offense, you fundamentally don’t understand what you’re up against.”

He also noted correctly that both political parties are guilty of cybersecurity failures, noting Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

What voters ought to be asking about cyber security, Hoech said, is how hack attacks directly threaten them and not some distant “government” computer system, and that primarily means attacks against the United States’ financial infrastructure.

FCW notes further:

Future hacks could cripple the financial system by exposing credit card numbers or SSNs at such a scale that payments can’t be processed, Identity Finder CEO Todd Feinman warned. And the massive amounts of stolen data already available to bad actors, including the information taken during the Office of Personnel Management breach, could be used for long-haul malfeasance, the likes of which we can’t necessarily fathom yet.

As a service to anyone who had their OPM data hacked, the government is offering three years’ worth of credit monitoring free. But Feinman said that’s just a PR stunt because hackers can and do sit on data for long periods of time before using it.

Feinman said voters ought to ask: “What are you going to do to hold organizations accountable when they have a data leak?”

He added that SSNs are particularly vulnerable because they are in a number of financial systems.

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See also:

https://fcw.com/articles/2015/11/11/cyber-election-debate-republican.aspx

http://www.cyberwar.news/2015-09-15-malware-already-in-place-to-bring-down-entire-u-s-infrastructure-sources.html