A Cooperative Effort to Win the Cyberwars

It is hardly news anymore that corporate and government networks and websites are under a constant barrage of cyberattacks. It takes a massive hack or service breakdown to get widespread notice: an apparently coordinated attack on major banks last fall; a multinational ATM scam starting late last year that followed the theft of online cardholder records from an Indian processing center; recent military-scale offensives traced to China that are causing some diplomatic rows.

That the threats are recognized and carried out in plain sight is a source of frustration to the cyberdefense community, a military-industrial complex that has been fighting these battles since before the Internet went mass-market. The continued successes of malicious hackers and other bad actors are all the more perplexing in view of the increasingly sophisticated technological weaponry targeting these vulnerabilities.

当时的当局在白宫转向致力于在网络统计力量之间分享的信息共享。情报机构之间的沟通不良帮助9/11恐怖分子穿过裂缝。现在有关于波士顿马拉松爆炸是否是一种暴露持续缺陷的类似失败的问题。

早期在过去的十年中,美国已经创建a Department of Homeland Security, restructured its intelligence apparatus and, through presidential executive orders, laid the groundwork for flows of strategically relevant antiterrorism and cybersecurity information not only across the government but also between U.S. agencies and the private sector, particularly in so-called critical infrastructures such as banking and energy. Perhaps the creation of new bureaucracies and the widening circle of interested parties complicated the mission.

President Barack Obama saw fit to underscore the information-sharing imperative in a February executive order. Headlined “Partnering with Industry to Protect Our Most Critical Assets from Cyber Attack,” the order “requires federal agencies to produce unclassified reports of threats to U.S. companies and requires the reports to be shared in a timely manner.”

奥巴马的命令为政府运行的国家标准与技术研究所与私营部门合作开发网络安全框架，以促进有效的系统和实践。努力是“在很大程度上取决于行业参与。。。为了在网络安全方面做出最好的决定，“副商务秘书雷维特卡副委员会在3月份在一个NIST研讨会上表示。

在2013年年度报告中，金融稳定监督理事会 - 美国财政主领导的监管机构有关系统风险 - 表示，“随着袭击的数量和复杂性增加，”对公司和行业的改进合作是必要的。公私伙伴关系可以进一步改善强大信息的分析和传播，以促进对Cyber​​Actacks的实时回应。“

Speaking at a Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference in April, Cyrus Amir-Mokri, the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said “government alone cannot keep our financial system safe” and called on the industry to establish “clearinghouses that gather information about recent threats, indicate whether these threats led to incidents and document the manner in which the threats or incidents were addressed or mitigated.”

In fact, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center has been doing just that since 1999, before the cyberdefense complex kicked into high gear. The momentum at the industry-run FS-ISAC — one of several such critical-infrastructure-centered entities — picked up in 2006 when former banking and payment systems executive William Nelson became CEO and worked on expanding the group’s membership internationally and refining its information-sharing mechanisms. In February, FS-ISAC won an RSA Conference Award — an annual honor for excellence in information security — for sharing information to thwart malicious attacks and threats with, among others, the Treasury and Homeland Security departments.

As heroic as FS-ISAC may be, no single entity, and no single collaborative entity, can stop the madness on its own. There are still technologies to harden, attitudes to change and lines of communication to open up. The defenders just have to keep grinding it out.

“我们可以擅长的唯一方式是分享信息，”加拿大艾伯塔省政府首席信息安全官员蒂姆麦克克克斯说。“我们每天都知道另一边的人们的信息。我们需要这样做。“

Jeffrey Kutler is editor-in-chief of Risk Professional magazine, published by the Global Association of Risk Professionals.