Will 2010 bring a wake-up call for cybersecurity?

Protecting networked systems isn't getting any easier

Protecting the nation’s networked systems from cyber threats is not going to get any easier in 2010, and the cybersecurity community will have to address issues that haven’t gotten a lot of attention in the past few years, according to security experts speaking at the Government Technology Research Alliance Council meeting.

Existing processes and technologies are not getting the job done because organizations and industry vendors are too focused on protecting network perimeters, said Amit Yoran, chief executive officer of NetWitness, at a luncheon Dec. 7. He is a former director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team and the Homeland Security Department’s National Cybersecurity Division.

Most information technology security tools are signature-based, which means they focus on known threats and cannot meet the challenges of emerging advanced threats from criminal organizations and nation-state adversaries, Yoran said. In today’s organizations, it is impossible to define where perimeters and boundaries are and where data is located.

“The security market is almost focused on network-layer activities, which is useless against advanced threats,” he added. GNC