Gen. Harry Raduege

Last week, Aviation Week held its Cybersecurity Forum, highlighting the maturing and varied threats from cyberspace.  Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege, Chairman of Deloitte’s Center for Cyber Innovation, outlined how cyber threats have evolved.

“Today, they’re much more sophisticated, more prevalent, and hackers have much more focused intent,” he said in a podcast.  “We’re experiencing massive losses of intellectual property.  Estimates are that we’re losing over a trillion dollars a year in data that’s being stolen, globally.”

He added that “aerospace and defense programs are susceptible to cyber attacks that can cause service outages and mission failure,” and said that the U.S. “knows of over 4,000 terrorist organizations that operate on the Internet.”

Gen. Raduege considers the United States “terribly vulnerable.”  He said, “there are many ways to penetrate the most secure systems that we have.  That ranges from electronic intrusions to naive employees.”

Gen. Dale Meyerrose

Gen. Dale Meyerrose of Harris Corporation also moderated several panels on cybersecurity, and he says that our focus “needs to be around cyber as it relates to critical infrastructure”

Gen. Meyerrose outlines two key goals in securing cyber infrastructure:

1. Making cyber infrastructure trustworthy.
2. Using cyber infrastructure to protect conventional infrastructure, e.g. banking, power, manufacturing and retail.

For Gen. Meyerrose, the greatest challenge is supply chain integrity.  “Without supply chain integrity, it’s impossible to establish trust in cyberspace.  With so much of our hardware, software and firmware manufactured offshore, the ability to assure supply chain integrity becomes more and more problematic.  That’s the insidious part.”

He added that, frequently, “we start the protection of cyber with the security or protection of cyberspace, and I think that’s way too late.  No matter how deep you dig that moat or how high you build that wall, you don’t have integrity without supply chain integrity.”

We should keep in mind, according to Gen. Meyerrose, that cybersecurity is a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself.  “Often times, we use the security of cyberspace as the burning platform, the sense of urgency, so we often forget that we’re not protecting cyberspace for the joy of protecting cyberspace.”

Gen. Meyerrose

The past 10 months have been very active in the field of cybersecurity. In May 2009, Melissa Hathaway published her findings from the 60 day Cyberspace Policy Review. In December 2009, President Obama announced that Howard Schmidt would hold the position of Cybersecurity Coordinator at the White House. In January, search engine giant Google announced that they were subjected to a cyber attack which seemed to emanate from China.

As the US looks towards increasing cybersecurity, the nation will look to build effective partnerships in the domestic and international arenas.

General Dale Meyerrose (AF, ret.), VP and General Manager for Cyberspace Solutions at Harris Corporation, recently told The New New Internet that partnerships are “absolutely critical, in my view. 90% of the critical infrastructure in the United States is in private ownership and there is, I think, an inherent responsibility of protection from the government.”

“Most of the sophisticated capability with regard to cyberspace, both capability and protection, reside in the government and a lot of it in the United States Military,” he said.

In the coming year, Schmidt will face a number of challenges, particularly in establishing his authority.

“The first thing is to make sure that he’s part of the right processes, that he has the right roles outlined for how other parts of the government will interface with him. I think he needs to outline the priorities that he’ll focus on,” Gen. Meyerrose said.

Conducting effective coordination between the disparate players involved in cybersecurity will be another significant challenge for Schmidt.

Gen. Meyerrose said “Probably the most difficult [challenge] to figure out is how to get the 22 different governmental departments and many agencies to give credence to working together in solving jointly the issues in front of our government, and our country.”

The federal government and private corporations are also looking to attract, train and retain top flight cyber professionals. According to Meyerrose, Harris Corporation works closely with a number of educational institutions in an effort to recruit the next generation of cyber professionals.

Cyber education of the general populace is equally important. With good cyber hygiene, the percentage of successful cyber attacks would be significantly reduced.

“There is a responsibility of our citizenry to protect not only themselves, but other users. I don’t think the importance of this social responsibility has been articulated, nor what these problems might be,” Gen. Meyerrose said. “The government can take part in this education through public service announcements and other such devices.”

“There are no pedestrians in cyberspace,” he said.

More than two years ago, Richard White packed his bags and headed to Washington, DC. His mission: to help Harris Corporation, an international communications and IT company headquartered in Melbourne, Fla., establish a greater presence in the Washington, DC area. As vice president of Harris’s Washington operations, White has been busy building up its Government Communications Systems Group (GCS), one of four major operating units at Harris, whose clients include the Department of Defense, Intelligence community, as well as several civilian agencies. His main goal, he says, is to stay focused. “There’s no lack of things to bid on in this town,” he says. “We’re focusing on specific areas that play to our core expertise.” Here White shares how Harris is enlarging the company’s footprint in the Washington, DC area in several key fields: healthcare, cyberspace, and intelligence work. Read the rest of this entry »

The fourth annual CES Government Conference is set to take place January 8-10, 2009 at the Ritz-Carlton in Lake Las Vegas, Nevada. The focus of this year’s premiere government technology showcase is on cybersecurity and the event will be held in conjunction with International CES,  the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow. Among the impressive list of scheduled speakers for CES Gov this year are: former Congressman Tom Davis, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy, General Dynamics CIO and vice president for information technology Woody Hall, and former CIO of the Department of National Intelligence Dale Meyerrose.

The conference, organized by Don Upson’s technology consulting group ICG Government, has quickly become a perennial destination of choice for local executives in the public and private sectors. To learn more, click here.

Additional information at CES Government Agenda, ICG Gov, Lythos Las Vegas, Gary’s Guide and Government Technology featuring Microsoft at CES