“Pay me now or pay me later,” says Brigadier General John Davis after he unveiled the cost of protecting the Pentagon from cyberassault.
According to Davis, “In the last six months, we spent more than $100 million reacting to things on our networks after the fact. It would be nice to spend that money proactively to put things in place so we’d be more active and proactive in posture rather than cleaning up after the fact.”
Davis is the deputy commander for network operations for the US Strategic Council and he seems to have his head on straight over where the money is being drained from. “I don’t think anybody realizes how much better shape we’d be in if we just did the basics right,” he said. “People need to just apply the basic rules and procedures that have been put in place to protect ourselves.” This includes simple things like not using portable data storage due to the threats caused by certain virii.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the mean time, has already awarded $30 million to the main players trying to upgrade the security system to improve the security “by orders of magnitude above our current systems.”
The networks themselves are perhaps among the most at risk by attackers, being hit thousands of times a day, ranging from “bored teenagers to the nation state with criminal elements sandwiched in there.”
This week, reports said Chinese and Russian cyberspies penetrated the U.S. electrical grid with the intent of being able to disrupt it in a time of conflict. Perhaps this is why Senators Snowe and Rockefeller are pushing for the internet Army?
Source: Network World via Slashdot
