What Will You Do When the Cyber-Levee Breaks?

A former senior FEMA official made an interesting remark about the levees in New Orleans: “There’s only two kinds of levees: Ones that have failed and those that will fail.” Does the same hold true for the “cyber-levee” we use to protect the Internet? One expert says it does.

In an opinion piece on the Computerworld website, expert Bruce Levinson says today’s Internet “is in the same position as New Orleans was before the hurricane, a heavily fortified resource of incalculable economic and cultural value whose protections will one day inevitably fail.”

Levinson, director of the CyberSecurity Policy Project at CyberSecure US, an affiliate of The Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, says just because failure is inevitable, it does “not mean that there should be any slackening of efforts by all stakeholders to continue strengthening cybersecurity protections.” Governments, industry, academia and individual computer users should still do their best to protect their own data and the Internet.

However, Levinson says it’s not always a bad thing to realize there are limits to securing the net. “Not only are there limits to how far we can go in securing the Internet, there should be limits,” he says. “After all, the most secure computer is one that is unplugged. Enjoying the social and economic benefits of the Internet also inherently means accepting and learning to manage risk.”

Contingency planning, he says, should be in place to help us overcome any issues that will occur when Internet protection fails. And, in addition to the usual planning, he also advises to plan to experience a communications failure, and to institute a forum to bounce ideas off of in the planning stages.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,104809,00.html?SKC=security-104809