A new article by Reuters' Jim Wolf largely sums up what we've all been expecting to hear for years; that the U.S. defense contractors (who provide the government with much of its cyber security services) is seeing an unbelievable amount of sensitive information vacuumed up by foreign cyber-spies or as a source quoted in the piece puts it:
Cybercrime has put the United States "on the losing end of what could be the largest illicit transfer of wealth in world history."
The article goes on to round up a vareity of quotes current and former government officials have made in recent years warning about the scale of cyber espionage directed against the U.S.
However, what's most alarming might be the quotes at the very end of the piece from former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) senior scientist Anup Ghosh who says that despite the Pentagon's recent investments in serious cyber defenses for its networks, the cyber advantage is still with the attackers:
"We've failed to innovate in the area of information security," he said in an email Tuesday. "We're fighting today's battles with the equivalent of cold-war era defenses."
This is pretty scary considering the speed at which cyber tech evolves. Despite a lot of talk about how the Pentagon is retooling its acquisition process to keep pace with tech evolutions that happen in a matter of days, it looks like we still have a ways to go in the inherently-handicapped game of cyber defense.
Here's the full article.
