Cybersecurity 2.0 Cybersecurity 2.0

Give Washington some credit: It looks as if politicians have learned it's not a good idea to destroy the Internet in order to save it.
Congress and the White House have considered dozens of bills over the past few years to address cybersecurity, chiefly how countries such as China and Russia are using the Web to access confidential information from companies and U.S. agencies.
The original approach was to create a "kill switch" empowering regulators to turn off access to the Web. New legislation would instead break down silos between U.S. companies and intelligence agencies so that cyber attacks can be tracked and reported, raising prospects for identifying cyber spies.
The U.S. is experiencing mind-boggling violations of cyber security. Consider this sample of violations traced to China alone discovered over the past year:
For a decade, hackers accessed the corporate computer network of Nortel, whose digital switches power much of the Web; defense contractor Lockheed Martin suffered a break-in when the SecureID system that provides encrypted authentication was breached; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had all its systems accessed (one tipoff of a problem was when a printer in its office mysteriously printed pages with Chinese characters); five large oil companies lost information about their operations, including bidding strategies; and hackers accessed details of the Pentagon's costliest weapons program—the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project—including aircraft design and electronics.
FBI Director Robert Mueller last month told a Senate committee that cyber espionage against infrastructure such as power plants will someday surpass terrorism as the "No. 1 threat to the country." This may be hyperbole, but the violations we know about are the tip of the iceberg. It takes a high level of sophistication to discover breaches of computer systems, which makes it likely that many remain undiscovered. Also, many companies choose not to disclose violations for fear of being sued. For example, news that some 30 high-tech companies had been hacked, including Yahoo, Adobe and Northrop Grumman, came to light a few years ago only when Google disclosed that the Gmail accounts for Chinese human-rights activists had been compromised.

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