hot topic | CYBERSECURITY NASCIO TOP 10 ISSUES
CYBER CRIME 'It’s Just a Matter of Time'
by Jennifer Ginn
In the early 1980s, a movie called WarGames featured a young computer hacker who accidentally ends up nearly causing World War III after he finds his way into a military supercomputer. By the 1990s, when America’s fledgling love affair with the Internet was just beginning to bloom, nosy hacker kids were about all businesses and governments needed to worry about with security breaches. “The first ones (hackers) were typically high school kids trying to demonstrate they were really smart and trying to get into the Pentagon,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, a research organization dedicated to cybersecurity, data protection and privacy. “It wasn’t really about stealing anything. It was about getting into places you weren’t supposed to go.” Now those kid hackers, the Internet and a new breed of cybercriminals have all grown up. Cyber pranks have turned into cyber warfare and state governments are learning that nobody is safe.
Problem Not Going Away
Ponemon said people often wonder why we are still talking about cybersecurity. That’s because it’s not going away, he said. “It’s kind of evolved now to where we’re actually contemplating cyber warfare,” he said. “It’s become a tool of mass destruction. If you turn off a utility or power company, it can cause a lot of damage and harm people. “The … security solutions that worked so well 10 or 15 years ago have become pretty much irrelevant. It’s a little like a nuclear arms race. … It’s a very, very hard, complex issue to manage. That’s why security has never been solved, really; it’s an unsolvable question.” Security breaches are not uncommon. According to a report from Rapid 7, a security software company, 268 data breaches in government agencies from Jan. 1, 2009, to May 31, 2012, exposed private information in more than 94 million records. Chad Grant, senior policy analyst for the National Association of State Chief Information Officers—also known as NASCIO—said state technology leaders are well aware of online threats. “It’s something that has been a major issue for state CIOs over the past decade and it’s continuing to be a larger and larger priority,” Grant said. “Every year we put together a state CIO priority list that the members vote on, and this year, security is still up there in that top 10. It was actually ranked at number three this year, just
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JULY / AUG 2013
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“Every state is being attacked daily. It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be breached.” —Utah Sen. Stuart Reid
