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It Doesn't Pay to Skimp on Cyber-Security (Opinion)

October 30, 2009 By Paul W. Taylor

On the heels of the sixth annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, information security has been generally accepted as a cost of doing business. The question is how to pay the tab.

Confronted by the Great Recession, some states and localities have deferred security spending to survive the budget crisis, making the same kind of Faustian bargain uninsured motorists do when they choose rent and food over insurance premiums. They perilously calculate that they'll catch up eventually and gamble that they can avoid accidents in the meantime. When the bet goes bad, there's hell to pay.

That is a loser's game because there's no telling where and when the next threat will hit. Just ask those who must secure the information and systems on which government relies. California Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Mark Weatherford and New York state CISO Will Pelgrin, who also heads the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), have strikingly similar top-of-mind issues that need work. The issues are theirs, the categorization here is mine:

A. Resolving Domains: Governments must consider domain name system security and the increased vulnerability that comes when states and localities use the dot-gov top-level domain, which has become the attack vector of choice.

B. Resource Roulette: Even the relatively young cyber-security discipline has tended to produce silos rather than synergies while competing for resources. Critical infrastructure, new platforms (smart grid, cloud computing and Web 2.0), applications (light, legacy and new enterprise) and devices (desktop and mobile) all must be secured, but you'd never know it by looking at the funding and policy patchwork in most jurisdictions.

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