What is Up With Cyber Security?
“Hacker”
I’m a cyber security expert and find it a fascinating field.
Why?
I decided to make a partial list:
- Cyber security is an emergent property of computers and the internet. No one saw it coming. When I started in this field about ten years ago, it was nearly impossible to get the grand “deciders” to invest even the tiniest amount of security engineering into a product. Regrets abound today.
- The laws around cyber security make it easy to get around them. The internet is global, laws are regional. Hacking that is legal in one country is illegal in another. Hackers located in Ecuador can legally break into US systems.
- Cyber weapons are rapidly becoming the most important weapon in a nation-state’s arsenal, and it takes relatively little investment to develop them. It cost the US $26 billion to develop the first atomic bombs, how many hackers can you hire for that amount of money in China? The nearly complete reliance of the US economy and infrastructure on the internet makes our country the most vulnerable.
- Both hacking (attacking) and security (defending) are simple. Though you have to be technically adept, it does not take a genius to do either. The thing that makes hacking difficult is the tedious search for vulnerabilities, and the thing that makes security difficult is defending the many avenues of attacks that come from the complexity and interconnectivity of devices today. That aside, almost all cyber attacks rely on very simple methods and approaches used on systems with almost no built-in security measures.
- Lastly, it is interesting because you never know what will happen next!
Posted in Cyber Security by Mark with comments disabled.