Last Week of NCSAM - Protect Our Infrastructure

Week 4 of #CyberAware week has an important theme -- protecting the nation's critical cyber infrastructure. I'm devoting the week's first post to that subject, but then I'm going to move on to a subject more appropriate to the target audience of this blog.

Recognizing fake news is a topic on which I've been collecting information since I started this blog. The subject just continues to get more complex. I'll never wrap my arms around it in a single post, so I've decided to do a week's worth of smaller, more focused posts on the topic. Perhaps after that some sort of a summary of the current situation will emerge.

The subject of our nation's critical infrastructure should be of importance to every one of us and all of us should be pressuring governments at all levels to strengthen and protect cyber infrastructure. Today I'm going to just deal with two aspects, business cybersecurity and our voting network.

Like other issues of strategic importance the security of the business's communications infrastructure should be a concern of the CEO and all other executives. Vigilance must start at the top. One CEO magazine says, “It all starts with acknowledging the problem is real – and that the threat is increasing.” CEOs must:

1. Improve Visibility: You can’t protect what you can’t see.
2. Incorporate Modern Cyber Defenses: AI and machine learning take center stage. See an earlier post on one AI approach.
3. Ensure Preparedness by treating cybersecurity as a strategic priority in terms of both organization and resources.

The infrastructure issue of overriding importance to all of us is the security of our voting infrastructure. Some towns, cities and states have worked hard on it. Others are using questionable tech or insufficient backup. We are more aware but probably little better protected than we were in 2016. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an objective perspective on the subject. The National Academies have prepared a report that looks ahead to 2020. Among its recommendations:

All U.S. Elections Should Use Paper Ballots by 2020 Presidential Election; 

Internet Voting Should Not Be Used at This Time 

This page has links to several presentations of the findings including an interesting infographic. 

 

Stay Safe!