By Ariana Mercado
Peter Singer is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brooking Institution, and gave a presentation at Dartmouth on Monday, May 15th, 2014 on Cybersecurity and Cyberwar. This presentation discussed changes in technology, explained how they affect global security, and gave advice on what an individual can do about the growing issue of cyber security.
Computation skills touch all aspects of society. Since the first website in 1991, there are currently over 30 trillion websites and 40 trillion emails are sent every year. In the next 5 years, internet enabled devices are estimated to reach 40 billion. All this activity and all these mediums for communication cause 98% of all military operations go through the civilian domain.
With all these amazing advantages to a more interconnected world there remain dangerous disadvantages. Every second, 9 new pieces of malware are discovered. 97% of all Fortune 500 companies admitted to having been hacked, and what Americans are most afraid of is a cyber-attack, with diplomats facing millions of cyber-attacks per day. It is estimated that in the next 10 years the number of cyber-attacks will double. 80 cyber security companies have entered the emerging industry of cyber security with a 10 fold return showing the growing demand for these services.
In addition, cyber security bureaucracies are emerging at both the local and federal level. From last year to this year the amount of times “cyber” was used in the Pentagon’s Annual Budget grew from 12 times to 147 times.
Though cyberwar is an art, 70% of business executives have made cyber security decisions with critically little academic experience in the field. Thus, Peter Singer stressed the importance of a comprehensive, holistic approach to cyber security. Cyber security is everything from the individual level to the organizational level to the global political level. All these different degrees of attacks are lumped together causing gaps in the understanding of the nature of cyber-attacks.
The Internet works on a system on trust. There are three trends to this system: 1. Cybercrime 2. Government actions on monitoring the internet. Pushes by authoritarian regimes in blocking the free flow of information (i.e. China and Russia). What can we do?
- Knowledge matters (don’t just leave it to the nerds),
- People matter (if you want to set up a response you have to understand the people behind the machines)
- Incentives (incentivize a solution to set up standards and regulations)
- History matters (prevention is always better than a cure).