In the words of Neustar Chairman and CEO Jeff Ganek, Neustar exists to “make communications work better,” and cyber security factors more and more heavily into that mission each day. On the heels of the highly successful Intelligence Squared debate on June 8 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. – for which Neustar was the sole corporate underwriter – the company welcomed Richard Clarke to its office on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday, July 30.
An internationally-recognized expert on homeland security, national security, cyber security and counterterrorism, Mr. Clarke is currently an on-air consultant for ABC News and teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He served as a senior White House Advisor to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
In a sobering 45-minute discussion rooted in his latest book Cyber War , Mr. Clarke opened by addressing the distinctions between the phenomena of cyber crime (international cartels siphoning billions of dollars using the internet), cyber espionage (sophisticated criminals infiltrating data repositories and extracting terabytes of intellectual property and R&D data from businesses, governments and organizations) and cyber war (which is essentially “cyber espionage v.2.0” in that the stolen data is used to cause real-world damage and destruction).
Mr. Clarke said that while corporations and government agencies do stop 80% of all attempted cyber attacks that occur daily, such attacks are automated and still number in the millions. Further, he stressed that every company, government agency and organization is more or less “on its own” when it comes to deciding what data needs to be protected – and what level of protection is deemed necessary. This mandate becomes more important when one considers the level of forethought that criminals are putting into cyber attacks today. (To cite just one example, “spearphishing” is a sophisticated scam in which hackers target a prominent executive of a company with the intent to acquire sensitive data.)
Will we see a public document setting forth the rules of cyber war in our lifetimes? How would we enforce “cyber arms control”? Is it possible for governments and countries to be held responsible for cyber attacks occurring within their borders? These and many other questions raised by Mr. Clarke remain unanswered – but are of critical importance to the increasingly networked world in which we live.
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