President Calls for Legislation for Cyber Defense

20 July 2012

National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center near Washington

President Obama is urging lawmakers to strengthen U.S. defenses against cyber warfare.

The president said foreign governments, criminal syndicates and individuals are probing U.S. financial, energy and public safety systems daily, looking for opportunities to wreak havoc.

“Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency. And as we’ve seen in past blackouts, the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill,” President Obama said in an essay published in the Wall Street Journal July 19. He urged the U.S. Senate to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 before the United States suffers a crippling attack.

The president said the key to effective defense against cyber attack is sharing of information.

The Bipartisan Policy Center said in a report released July 19 that more than 50,000 cyber attacks on private and government networks were reported to the Department of Homeland Security from October 2011 through February 2012.

These were “only a small fraction” of cyber attacks carried out in the United States, the report said.

Many private companies conceal cyber attacks out of fear that their reputations would be harmed and their customers would disappear if the public knew their computer systems had been compromised, the report said. Former National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden and businessman Mortimer Zuckerman oversaw the drafting of the report.

The report agreed with President Obama that greater sharing of information would enhance cybersecurity. “Despite general agreement that we need to do it, cyber information sharing is not meeting our needs today,” the document said.

The president said new cybersecurity legislation must also protect individual privacy, civil liberties and the interests of free enterprise.

PCWorld magazine reports that the cost of cybercrime to corporations rose 56 percent from 2010 to 2011. The median cost of a cybercrime to a corporation was $5.9 million and the average number of days it took to resolve a cyber attack was 14 days, the magazine reported.

Cyber attackers "are more ingenious in how they launch the attack, which makes it harder to find once they launch it,” says technology expert Prescott Winter as quoted in the magazine.

Another technology expert quoted in the magazine, Larry Ponemon, says computer firewalls no longer are able to keep out all cyber attackers.

“There is no such thing as a bulletproof perimeter,” Ponemon said. “It’s absolutely guaranteed these days that the attacker will get in. So the strategy has to change from watching the outside wall to trying to figure out what’s happening inside the network.”