It’s war

When the triple crown of cyber outages in financial services, communications and transportation, occurred last week we all waited tremulously for the next one just as one does for an aftershock of an earthquake.

Today we are seeing the revelations emerging that suggest “glitch” over “hack” in each case but either way the reaction seems all too subdued and way too calm. One report in from HMG Strategy LLC suggests that having a team trained and on standby to remediate the incident’s consequences is all that we need.

Absolutely not! We are all under attack right now. Hostile foreign governments, organized crime and terrorists are recruiting the best and brightest as part of their respective cyber-armies to plunder the cyber-fabric of our society.

We cannot stand idly by accepting the glancing blows of each attack that fails because the one that gets through will knock us out for the count. It’s been calculated by the Ponemon Institute that the average outage in a large, highly regulated organization, costs $500,000.

We must be proactive and defend ourselves against any and every ever threat and we must adapt and anticipate threats yet to be conceived and executed.

Further, we must take the offensive. If a threat penetrates our defenses we must track it, log it, record it with the hope of tracing it to its source so that we can use diplomatic, legal or military force to neutralize the threat.

Make no mistake here: we are at war. In the last three centuries of conflict we have shifted from military casualties to civilian ones, but today the casualty is commerce.