In the midst of staying at home, I have decided to watch the speeches from this year’s RSA conference to fill the time between Netflix and work. During the conference, RSA president Rohit Ghai spoke about the human element with regards to the Cyber Security profession and I found some of his words very intriguing. The main point of his keynote was how we in the Cyber Security field have to move forward into the new decade. First, we have to reclaim the narrative. So many of us are constantly talking about the failures of cyber security and how companies are getting owned by attackers and by doing that we are actually shooting ourselves in the foot. When we frame the battle of defending our networks from a zero sum viewpoint, we provide a false dilemma. We think there has to be a winner and a loser. The attacker succeeds at dropping ransomware on our network and we see it as he won and we lost but by doing that we don’t realize that we still have the ability to control the story more than we might imagine. He brought up the attack against the city of Atlanta. The city made the brave decision not to pay the ransom even though they knew they were going to have a long road in rebuilding their network but in doing so they actually forced a lose-lose situation. The criminals didn’t win either. This gives us some hope for the future. Even if we get hit by the “bad guy”, we can limit their gain.
In order to succeed at thwarting cyber criminals, we have to make the attacks less lucrative, we have to avoid paying their ransoms and we have to start developing a more organized defense across industry verticals. Many information sharing groups are currently operating across the United States and the Open Cybersecurity Alliance has developed the first open source language for sharing intelligence across platforms (See here). These are important first steps towards a more structured defense. It is hoped we will continue to look for more ways to improve information sharing and blunting the criminal activity across the Internet.