On Monday night at the Glass Pavilion, the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) hosted a panel of four experts from various fields who discussed the growing issue of cyber security in the U.S.
The panelists included Dennis McCallam, a researcher at the Air Force Research Laboratory; Lawrence Gordon, an economics professor at the University of Maryland; Dr. Sam Small, a member of the University’s Security and Privacy Applied Research lab; and Adam Suri, Director of Cyber Security and the Office of Innovative Technologies at the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.
Topics addressed by the panel varied widely from the need to motivate the private sector to invest in cyber security to the potential costs of a cyber attack to a corporation to the government’s role in reducing the risk of cyber attacks in the country.
Professor Gordon opened the program by asking each of his fellow panelists how they view cyber security and what they see as the major threats confronting the country. In general, the panelists all agreed that the country’s infrastructure assets were most at risk by a potential cyber attack.
And though cyber attack risk can’t be eliminated, it can be managed, Professor Gordon argued. Gordon is currently part of a team commissioned by President Obama that is exploring the possibility of creating a cyber security industry that would enable the transfer of cyber attack risk to insurance companies.
“Why would we want a well-established cyber security industry?” Gordon asked. “Because then what would happen is that companies would go to get this insurance, to transfer the risk, but these insurance companies would of course put in these deductibles and you have to have certain things in place in order to get a reasonable rate.”
Yet, taking such additional cyber security measures still does not ensure complete immunity to cyber attacks.
“Part of the problem is the interconnectivity around the world,” Gordon said. “So, it’s not only your standards but it’s the standards of the people you’re doing business with around the world . . . the Internet is only as good as its weakest link.”
The elusive nature of cyber attacks is also of concern when considering the potential threat of cyber warfare or cyber terrorism.
“Part of the problem of cyber warfare is in a traditional war if someone fires a missile or drops a bomb on a specific area, typically you can figure out without too much trouble where that attack originated from,” Dr. Small said.
“In the cyber domain, it’s a lot more difficult. So, just because a cyber attack was traced back to a certain machine in a certain place, it doesn’t mean that that place has any affiliation with the actors involved.”
This makes cultivating an appropriate response to a cyber attack more difficult because the initiator of the attack is unknown, Small added.
“There’s a whole spectrum of cyber attacks,” Small said. “This is a landscape that is still very new.”
Visiting graduate student Anna-Lena Honig said she thought the topic was pertinent to her international relations and political science studies and that she enjoyed the panelists.
“I like that they all came from different settings, that they had their own personal and professional opinions about the issue, that they addressed different aspects,” Honig said. “And I think they all stressed what was really important for them. So. I think that as a member of the audience you could really figure out what different aspects were important to them and then make your judgments from that.”
First-year graduate student Shivakumar M., who is studying cyber security at the University’s Information Security Institute, also liked the diversity of the panel and appreciated that the panelists were thorough without being too technical.
“It’s a very growing field so there are a lot of open ends that can explode,” Shivakumar said. “For example, insurance. The thing about cyber security is that there is a lot research going on about how to calculate the costs of a security breach. Another thing is that as you breach a previous incident, the next event tends to be more dramatic.”
Freshman Rachel Cohen, a member of FAS, thought the panel topic was interesting and one that most undergraduates don’t often discuss.
“It fits in with the overall theme of individuals in a globalized society,” Cohen said. “You think that what you do on the Internet is your own but as we saw with Egypt the entire Internet can shut down and everyone’s things can be tapped into, so when we were brainstorming topics for panels, the Internet seemed like a good topic.”
For freshman Leila Collins and sophomore Andrew Davis, members of FAS that assembled the panel, it was important to have academic, military and government representatives as well as someone from the University.
“I think it went really well,” Collins said. “As a school that has both a great computer science department and a great international studies department, I think that it’s important that we have a panel addressing the newest problem for American politics and American international relations, which I think is cyber security.”
