CSO

For someone my age, I have had a unique perspective on how pervasive the use of technology has become.  The first 8 years of my life were spent in the small town of Albion, ID (population 200 on a good day back then).  The infrastructure of Albion could best be categorized as… well… primitive.  The town’s phone system still had a switchboard operator and there were still many rural party lines that ran between the farms that ringed the town.  For a while, there was only 1 UHF television station and the “media center” at the 2-room schoolhouse I attended was made up of a 16mm projector and celluloid movie reels of films from the 40’s and 50’s (I’m not sure how many times I watched Father Goose, but it was quite a few).  It was a great place to spend those early years of my life – if you have ever read Fitzgerald’s Great Brain book series, you have a good idea of what life in Albion was like.
 
Contrast those early years of my life to some of the projects that I worked on while at Microsoft; contributing to the design of the Sistema de Pagamento Brasileiro (Brazil’s financial system for inter-bank transactions), building out CANTV’s first internet datacenter in Venezuela, working on improved healthcare solutions for Phillips Medical Systems in Amsterdam.  Traveling around the world to work on those projects gave me an opportunity to see just how dependent our civilization has become on technology.  We had a glimpse at the paranoia that was caused by the Year 2000 issue because of this dependency.  Fortunately, there were not any significant events that disrupted our infrastructure caused by efficiency-minded programmers using only 2 digits for the year fields in their systems.  But now we’re in a completely new landscape – one where we have a sworn enemy that is bent on attacking the core of our civilization and values.
 
In the last several months, I have toured many facilities and spoken with a wide variety of infrastructure asset owners to better understand their reliance on technology for the successful delivery of the services that we all depend on.  One of the observations that I took away from these learning opportunities – the economics of critical infrastructure are driving a significant increase in the number of ‘connected systems’ – in most cases legacy systems that were not designed to be connected to networks are slowly but surely joining the internet age.
 
Combine this economic incentive for efficiencies with the realization of extreme islamists that the internet can be an effective tool for them to achieve their objectives – and you get an environment where there is real cause for concern.  Over the last several years there have been fatwas issued by extremists where terrorist leaders promote the idea of using the strength of our communications systems against their owners, a sort of 'Botnet Fatwa'.  Think of this as judo – that martial art famous for using an opponent’s strengths against themselves – on an enormous scale, thousands of attackers using hundreds of thousands of our very own compromised systems to attack the core of our infrastructure. 
 
What do we do about it?  At the broadest consumer level – appropriate internet/system hygiene must be practiced by anyone who uses a computer.  Every system left unprotected represents one more node for terrorists and criminals to compromise and enslave to their evil objectives.  At the industry level – we need to establish a fair playing field where organizations are incented to improve the security of critical infrastructure assets.  At the government level – we need to improve our capabilities to respond quickly and efficiently to computer-based attacks on our infrastructure.  That will require improving both legislative and law enforcement understanding of the issues surrounding computer-based attacks on critical infrastructure.  It is a formidable task ahead of us – but the continuity of the services that we depend on requires that we work together to find solutions before the bad guys figure out how to throw our economy to the ground in a giant judo maneuver.

- Aaron Turner