The government urgently needs to recruit an elite cadre of innovators able to lead a workforce with a different, entrepreneurial ethos ”“ including hackers ”“ as solvers of puzzles. Rather than developing security measures in bunkers or silos, we should be bold and emulate the “small world clusters” that brought together the world’s best health laboratories to defeat the Sars epidemic in weeks, not years. The US now admits to a “human capital crisis in cybersecurity,” with estimates that up to 30,000 cybersecurity professionals are needed against the 1,000 it has. The answer could lie in online self-managing collaborative ventures of the kind that created the free open-source pc operating system, Linux. That is the future of cybersecurity, open networks collaborating against mutual threats.
Critically, innovation must not fall victim to budget constraints in the current climate of austerity. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has described the economic crisis and recession as the greatest challenge to national security. In the US, cybersecurity co-ordinator Howard Schmidt forms strategic links with economic policy through the office of management and budget in the White House. The UK National Security Council appears to distance itself from economic matters, regardless of the security risks in a sluggish recovery. Britain needs to learn from the US and ask whether enough cyberspending is allocated to education, research and development. Strategies have to evolve fast. It is not yet too late.
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(FT) John Reid–England's salt risks draining into cyberspace
The government urgently needs to recruit an elite cadre of innovators able to lead a workforce with a different, entrepreneurial ethos ”“ including hackers ”“ as solvers of puzzles. Rather than developing security measures in bunkers or silos, we should be bold and emulate the “small world clusters” that brought together the world’s best health laboratories to defeat the Sars epidemic in weeks, not years. The US now admits to a “human capital crisis in cybersecurity,” with estimates that up to 30,000 cybersecurity professionals are needed against the 1,000 it has. The answer could lie in online self-managing collaborative ventures of the kind that created the free open-source pc operating system, Linux. That is the future of cybersecurity, open networks collaborating against mutual threats.
Critically, innovation must not fall victim to budget constraints in the current climate of austerity. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has described the economic crisis and recession as the greatest challenge to national security. In the US, cybersecurity co-ordinator Howard Schmidt forms strategic links with economic policy through the office of management and budget in the White House. The UK National Security Council appears to distance itself from economic matters, regardless of the security risks in a sluggish recovery. Britain needs to learn from the US and ask whether enough cyberspending is allocated to education, research and development. Strategies have to evolve fast. It is not yet too late.
Read it all (requires subscription).