Cybersecurity is No Longer Optional! – Musings on ASEI’s Cybersecurity Summit by Syna Sharma
Cybersecurity is a growing problem around the world. Many of our nation’s most important ports and elections are becoming compromised due to a lack of understanding of the importance of cybersecurity. Recently, ASEI held a Cybersecurity Summit, hearing from many different speakers and covering a wide range of topics, including overview of the threat landscape, building a secure future, and software supply chain security. One of the topics discussed that intrigued me the most was protecting the homeland from cyber risk.
Aastha Verma, the chief of vulnerability management at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), used many unique analogies to compare the different components of cybersecurity to the Wild West. Everything one can envision in the Wild West applies to the cyber world as well. Ethical hackers are cowboys; malicious actors of all types are outlaws and bandits; defenseless IT staff with primitive tools are sheriffs; and our most critical data assets are gold mines.
After laying the basic foundation for cybersecurity components, Aastha talks about the different opportunities everywhere for us to respond better and faster, such as the 2020 water disaster in Flint, Michigan, which was an epic monitoring fail. Similarly, airports, shipping ports, and spaceports are all at risk. An eye-opening point made by Aastha was the lack of anonymity and privacy we have in our day-to-day lives due to our devices. Self-service and automation are now an expectation. Using your WiFi connection, those same devices self-report back to home base whenever you leave the house. There is less ability to be anonymous.
A shocking statistic shown by the ransomware task force was that ransoms in 2020 increased by 171% compared to 2019, due to COVID exposure and the ransomware epidemic. 560 healthcare facilities were hit by ransomware. That is an appalling number, which led to Aastha’s final piece of advice, “Know where your software comes from and participate and learn about these topics,” because cybersecurity is not a choice.
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Syna Sharma is a San Jose, CA based rising high school freshman spending her summer time productively by interning and getting involved with ASEI activities. She participates in volleyball, tennis, and different forms of dances.
