Obama Officials Urge Global Cooperation on Cybersecurity
Collaboration on cybersecurity inside and outside the U.S. is key to securing cyberspace globally, administration and international officials said Tuesday at a Georgetown University conference. White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt urged all agencies of the U.S. government to work together to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity posture. Defense and State department officials told a later panel that all nations must work together to stabilize cyberspace.
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U.S. networks are “bleeding like crazy,” said Schmidt. “We need the government’s help, we need an all-government approach to this,” he said. It’s important to leverage the cybersecurity expertise of each federal agency, not just one, he said. “We sit at a table together because none of us believe we can solve this ourselves.”
The private sector plays a “critical role, if not a leadership role in what we are doing” to reduce the nation’s cybersecurity threats, Schmidt said. Owners and operators of the nation’s core critical infrastructure should “prove to the government that they are doing everything they need to do to make sure their systems are secure.” Schmidt said the U.S. has “not moved fast enough” to curb the theft of intellectual property and needs to send a “clear message” to nation states that cyberattacks are an “unacceptable activity.”
Cybersecurity is a “team sport” involving cooperation among government agencies, the private sector and other countries, said Steven Schleien, U.S. Defense Department principal director for cyber policy. Cyberspace is not bound by borderlines, so national governments should work together and establish norms of international behavior, he said. International cooperation is key to success, agreed Anatoly Streltsov, vice-director of Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Information Security Institute. Some issues can’t be resolved “separately by separate states,” he said through a translator.
The goal is to “create a stable international environment,” said Christopher Painter, U.S. State Department coordinator for cyber issues. There must be “an equilibrium that no state has incentive to disrupt,” he said. That’s a “multilateral effort” and -- with discussions still in early stages -- remains a “long road,” Painter said. It’s important to engage all nations, including developing countries, he said. One approach to motivating poorer countries is to show how good security can bolster their economies, he said. Finding stability among nations will require working out differences among nations’ individual cultures, said Streltsov.
Governments are paying increasing attention to cybersecurity, Painter said. The issue used to be seen as technical but now is considered critical to national security and foreign policy, he said. The “global cyber arms race is not proceeding at a leisurely or even linear fashion, but is in fact accelerating,” said Rear Adm. Samuel Cox, director of intelligence for the U.S. Cyber Command. “This increasingly vertical nature of the threat is what is motivating my boss and others” to move with “urgency,” he said.
Awareness and expertise remain lacking in cybersecurity, said Gerben Baltink, secretary of the Dutch Cyber Security Council in the Netherlands. “A lot of people simply do not yet understand the critical vulnerabilities we deal with on a daily basis.” Enhancing awareness and “raising the level of cyberhygiene” among citizens would “save us at least 80 to 85 percent of the trouble,” he said.