How to Combat the Global Cybercrime
Wave (Op-Ed)
Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike |
Dmitri Alperovitch is a computer security
researcher and co-founder & CTO of
CrowdStrike Inc., which provides cloud-
based endpoint protection. With expertise
incybersecurity technology, policies and
state tradecraft, Alperovitch also holds
eighteen technology patents. This Op-Ed
is part of a series provided by the World
Economic Forum Technology Pioneers,
class of 2015
. Alperovitch contributed this article to
Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed &
Insights.
Today, economic reliance on the internet
is all-encompassing. With 40 percent of
the world population now online, there is
hardly an industry that has not been
dramatically transformed and
empowered by the communication and
business opportunities created. But the
very thing that has been such a powerful
engine of global economic growth is now
threatening to undermine it.
Cyberthreats from hacktivists and
terrorist groups, cybercriminals and
nation states have had an impact on
millions of companies, government
agencies, nonprofit organizations and
individuals over the past several
decades.
The risks have grown
Only in the past few months, an attack
on the U. S. Office of Personal
Management (OPM) by a sophisticated
nation-state actor resulted in the theft of
the highly personal and detailed records
of more than 21 million people.
Hacktivist and terrorist groups have
successfully defaced websites and
launched denial-of-service attacks, which
disabled access to numerous networks
and systems, and leaked sensitive and
private information collected from
targeted organizations.
The financial impact can also be direct:
Transnational organized cybercriminal
groups have stolen hundreds of millions
of dollars from financial institutions and
ordinary citizens. In 2014 alone, the
FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center
(IC3)
received hundreds of thousands of
reports with a total aggregate loss of
more than $800 million in 2014.
But perhaps the greatest economic threat
of all comes from the persistent
campaigns by major countries to hack
into the networks of innovative and
successful companies to steal their most
valuable trade secrets and intellectual
property.
A rapidly growing number of nation
states have determined that
cyberespionage is a highly valuable tool
not only to steal national and military
secrets but also to pillage the most
valuable business information from
international competitors and pass it on
to domestic industries to help them out-
innovate and out-negotiate their rivals.
This cuts through the heart of the
modern economic system, which
assumes and relies on fair competition in
the global free market. What's worse is
that it destroys the incentive for
businesses to invest in innovation and
research and development if they can
rely instead on the intelligence
instruments of their country's national
power to steal and reuse the innovation
of others.
And while cyberespionage is having a
tremendous negative affect on the global
economy from the theft-caused drain of
intellectual property and the resulting
adverse incentives for continued
investments in innovative growth, the
threat from destructive and disruptive
attacks is amplifying risks even further.
In the past three years, entertainment
companies such as Sony Pictures and
Las Vegas Sands Casino, and Middle
Eastern oil and gas corporations, have
come under devastating nation-state
orchestrated cyberattacks that have
demolished their networks and halted
their business operations for weeks.
[DARPA Kicks Off Two-Year
Cybersecurity Hack-A-Thon
]
But what is even more insidious is the
prospect of covert modifications of
critical data, such as financial records or
stock market settlement statements,
which could cause lasting and
enormously costly damage to the global
financial system, and as a result, the
world economy.
Laying down the law
What can be done to address these
enormous global challenges?
One of the most important is the urgent
establishment of global norms among
the major industrial and developing
countries on issues of national security
and economic cyberespionage conducted
by their intelligence agencies and military
services. As daily news accounts of
discovered hacking incidents from
around the world reveal, this problem is
reaching epidemic proportions, with
more and more countries involved.
Unless an enforceable accord can be
established to regulate the impact of
these activities on private sector
companies and regular citizens, this
issue will poison global business
relationships and further Balkanize the
Internet.
Source
http://www.livescience.com/51864-defeating-cybercrime-requires-a-global-effort.html
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