un-earthed

Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director

It seems the FBI have come up with the solution to the cyber threats posed by all the bad forces on the Internet!

Sounds promising, one would think the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation ‘an intelligence-driven and a threat-focused national security and law enforcement organization’ would have a good handle on this but I think they have missed the mark with this solution suggested by Shawn Henry, the FBI’s executive assistant director. Henry suggests that in order to protect critical utility and financial systems a separate and highly secure internet should be set up.

Great idea but separate and (potentially) highly secure networks exist already they’re called private networks or Wide Area Networks (WANs). However critical infrastructure and the financial system still gets connected to the Internet – why? The reason is simple, and is the reason why the Internet is pervasive. There are great benefits in connecting to it; you can cost effectively connect to business partners, suppliers and your staff can connect to you from anywhere! A secure separate Internet will fail because it does not meet the needs of businesses. Putting it in another way, if you think the Internet is a bucket of sh!t. Getting a clean bucket is not going to solve the problem….. is it?

Henry does make some sound points for ‘his’ Internet, in that only known and trusted entities should be able to communicate but this can be achieved on our current Internet with the use of strong authentication and secure virtual private network solutions.

I do agree with some of Henry’s sentiments ”We can’t tech our way out of the cyberthreat,” – too right! But, Mr. Henry, building another Internet is just an extreme example of trying to ‘tech’ your way out of the problem! There is no one or easy solution. Organisations need to treat security seriously. In my view that means starting by understanding their security posture! With that in mind employ appropriate protective and detective technologies, then continuously monitor for any untoward activity and have the correct incident response mechanisms in place.