A survey released recently shows that Germans are increasingly afraid of cyber crime. The same day, the media reported a cyber attack on a leading Japanese defence company. Another survey showed that 8.5 million UK homes experienced some form of cyber-attack in the first three months of 2011.
Not that long ago, the only cyber attacks seen were in (often bad) science fiction films. Now botnets, malware, and the like have moved from the big screen to our small screens, and the reality is that we’re now all targets.
While cyber attacks – until quite recently – were about simple viruses and worms, the threats these days are far more advanced. The threat now includes botnets, which are networks of thousands or millions of hacked computers that hackers use to send out spam e-mails, attack corporate and government networks, and perform all kinds of malicious activities.
At the same time, we’re increasingly going mobile and using more and more devices and software, which gives cyber criminals more breaking and entering points. And data traffic is sky rocketing to around 700 petabytes a day globally (a Petabyte being a million billion bytes of data, or a “one” followed by 15 zeros). Added to this, cyber crime is a booming business. According to the 2011 Norton Cybercrime Report, the global cost of cybercrime in 2011 was estimated at $388 billion.
Anyone who has suffered even a brief IT outage knows how disruptive it is to productivity. Cyber attacks can bring business and government infrastructures to a halt for hours or days.
And cyber attacks have a longer-term destabilizing effect. If you run a business, your customers might lose confidence if your systems go down. And confidence and trust in public authorities goes down if there are water or power outages.
Information security is an ecosystem, in which all types of providers – government agencies, network providers, as well as software, device and application companies – must pull together to combat cybercrime. At AT&T we do our part using a smart network as the first line of defense. We have robust systems within core network infrastructures designed to detect and mitigate cyber attacks against the infrastructure and to tackle emerging threats.
Cyber security is now on the “A-list” of most governments’ priorities, as it should be. Cooperation is a huge issue. The slow pace of collaboration across many different levels continues to be a major obstacle to successfully combatting cyber threats across the globe. But public policies must let providers of smart networks, such as AT&T, apply sophisticated network management practices that our customers request. Because protecting millions of customers is at the heart of our business (we carry 27.4 petabytes of data on an average day), we have a lot of artillery to bring to the battle.
There’s no easy solution to cybercrime. But cooperation and collaboration is how we will stay ahead of the growing threats to cyber security and protect the digital infrastructure of individuals, businesses, public services and governments. And as European Commissioner Kroes said in her blog last week, we also believe that users trust is the key that will unlock the huge potential of the Internet. And we need to remember that we cannot undertake this challenge unilaterally as it is clearly a global issue in all its dimensions. We must create a comprehensive strategy for addressing global cooperation in cyber security, and the EU – US Working Group on Cyber Security and Cyber Crime created last November is a great example of international public/private cooperation and a good start to this effort.
But we should never forget that our cyber adversaries are very dynamic, ever more sophisticated, and nimble. They do not operate under a laboriously defined set of rules or processes. The challenges we face in cyber security could never be solved by imposing prescriptive or slow moving legislation on those who build, operate, and use cyber space. To enable the smart networks that are needed to address the threats that emerge from our rapidly changing information infrastructure, government policy must encourage coordination and innovation in network security and continued investment in advanced network technologies. That’s how we stay ahead of the growing threats to cyber security and protect our digital infrastructure.
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