2010 Cyber Security Watch: Companies Unprepared for Cyber Crime

Deloitte in collaboration with CSO Magazine, the U.S. Secret Service, and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon issued the results of the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey. And, the results were sobering: many organizations are focused on stopping random hackers and blocking pornography when they should be concerned with bigger threats from professional cybercriminals. The survey was conducted last year with 523 IT and security managers, top-level executives, and law enforcement personnel and it found that hackers were rated the biggest threat, followed by insiders and foreign entities.

This report further reinforces that there is a larger more sinister issue brewing when it comes to cyber security: hackers and rogue nations causing havoc on our cyber security infrastructure. And, the NY Times came out with a front-page story today about how top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks. According to the article, the results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation.

So, the take away from all of this news is that attackers from nation-states and organized crime syndicates use more sophisticated techniques that can do more economic damage and go undiscovered. We face some very daunting cyber security challenges and the main point that keeps resonating it that we are NOT prepared and do not have the tools to deal with it. Welcome all thoughts and feedback on this!