WASHINGTON – Cyber security experts rallied behind President Barack Obama’s proposal this week to increase cyber security.
Obama and United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday announced the need to increase information sharing between federal and private sectors, starting with the financial sector.
“Every day foreign governments, criminals, and hackers are attempting to probe, intrude into, and attack government and private sector systems in both of our countries,” the White House said in a statement Friday.
Cyber security became a more public issue after Sony was hacked in November because the studio’s movie “The Interview.” The comedic movie plot centers on the assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and was initially released directly to rental because of terrorist threats.
“We need to be able to create doubts in the mind of the attacker as to whether the attack is going to succeed and whether the retaliation is worth it,” Paul Stockton, former assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, said Thursday.
Stockton, former congressman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, took part in a cyber-security discussion Thursday at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
They discussed the president’s response to the cyber-attack and the possibility of future attacks by more sophisticated nation states.
The president said North Korea was responsible for the hack and increased sanctions against North Korea. The new sanctions block access to financial assets held in the U.S. by North Korean officials.
“Now the United States will have to show that it will not tolerate it because everyone is watching,” Rogers said.
Rogers said he expected a bigger response from the United States as a reaction to the attack than increasing sanctions. He said the response should have been enough to deter countries from trying a cyber-attack in the future.
Unlike other hacking incidents, Sony experienced destruction of property. Rogers said this is the game changer that is the reason the president openly named North Korea as the country behind the attack.
Hayden described North Korea as a “pathological little gangster state” and said the United States did not increase the sanctions enough.
“We have not yet worked out a taxonomy in the cyber domain that mirrors the taxonomy in the physical space that took us a couple millennia to decide what constitutes territoriality and limits,” Hayden said.
The U.S. Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube sites were hacked on Monday.
This corroborates Stockton’s insistence that hackers are already in the system.
“We need to assume that precisely because cyber-attack capabilities are getting better and better, that the Maginot Line, the perimeter of defense, would fail,” Stockton said.
All three agreed the need for legislation is critical, but Rogers said he thinks legislation will take a few more years.
Reach reporter Tori Knueven at [email protected] or 202-408-1492.
