Serious Call for Improved Cyber Security

An op-ed in The New York Times, notes that for the last two months, senior government officials and private-sector experts have paraded before Congress and described in alarming terms a silent threat: cyberattacks carried out by foreign governments.

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., said cyberattacks would soon replace terrorism as the agency’s No. 1 concern as foreign hackers, particularly from China, penetrate American firms’ computers and steal huge amounts of valuable data and intellectual property.

It’s not hard to imagine what happens when an American company pays for research and a Chinese firm gets the results free; it destroys our competitive edge.

Shawn Henry, who recently retired as the executive assistant director of the F.B.I. (and its lead agent on cybercrime), told Congress last week of an American company that had all of its data from a 10 year, $1 billion research program copied by hackers in one night. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the military’s Cyber Command, called the continuing, rampant cybertheft “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Many companies do not even know when they have been hacked. According to Congressional testimony last week, 94% of companies served by the computer-security firm Mandiant were unaware that they had been victimized.

Our reason for drawing attention to the op-ed article is not to take sides on what Congress or the Administration should be doing to better protect business from attacks, foreign or domestic. We simply note the need for companies, large and small, to take cyber security seriously.