When I was invited as a speaker and panelist at a conference organized by Attorney General’s Chambers of Malaysia in 2010, I did repeatedly mention about the movie Die Hard 4 to the audience. It was not about Bruce Willis (even though I admire him as one of the great actor of Hollywood) but on the “inevitable”…What’s coming forth?
This movie perfectly illustrates the catastrophe. It gives you an idea about Cyber Warfare or Cyber Terrorism devastation.
We live in this borderless world and our cyberspace gateways are purely managed by electronic machines…routers, firewalls, switches and etc. Machine is still a machine, where it will obediently operates as per instructions. It will be no more, no less. Some machines will have some sort of intelligence but susceptible to false positive.
I’m not going to argue on the issue between the football fans and FAM but merely to share on the cyber security incident generally.
What I want to share here is the system that we own is our responsibility. It is just like our house that we need to secure by putting grills, alarms, CCTVs, pad locks and etc. When we were given the house keys by the developer, normally the house is without the above mentioned items.
The same goes to any IT system be it wireless router, laptops and etc. When you take it out of the box, by default, the security of the item is minimal. It is our responsibility to improve the security.
This article is a good read. “USA’s View on World Cyber Security Issues,” by N.Schneidewind [1]. He wrote on new legislation in regards to security issues is highly thought of. This is factual because the law is not evolving fast enough as the technology. The technology is borderless but not the law. The author touches on a few important things as follows.
- Little evidence that the world is secure
- Understanding of technical and policy issues is important
- Then calling for new legislation would be easier
- Research and innovation are important
- Above all, the technical implementation of the National Strategy to Secure Cyber Space
The author also mentioned about new thinking on how to solve the cyber security problem and implementation of plans to solve the problem that have been proposed but action has been lacking.
[1] N.F.Schneidewind. “USA’s View on World Cyber Security Issues,” in Cyber Warfare and Cyber Terrorism, L.J.Janczewski and M. Colarik, Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2008, pp. 446-452.
