Opinion
OPINION: Three steps for a safer cyberspace
The spy gadget guru "Q" in the Bond movie Skyfall claims he can do more damage from his laptop sitting in his pajamas than Bond can do in a whole year. The movie is a fairly accurate, if highly dramatized, account of where global society is headed in the 21st Century. That is -- If we don’t get our collective cyber houses in order. We just can’t reach our potential as civilized societies under today’s unfettered, state-of-nature approach to cybersecurity. For a while it looked like the...
read moreOPINION: Outraged? Look at the Bastion attack
Hopefully all the loud congressional posturing over the Benghazi attack is being matched by quieter oversight of the decisions that preceded the Taliban raid three days later at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. Insurgents crept up to the base in three groups and used old-fashioned wire cutters to penetrate the fencing. They destroyed six American Harrier jets and seriously damaged two others. Two U.S. Marines were killed in the fight to keep the insurgents from reaching their main objective, the...
read moreOPINION: The dangers of Benghazi politicking
The Obama administration has entered dangerous territory by letting unnamed senior intelligence officials join the public fray over the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The administration’s frustration at the media’s treatment of Benghazi is understandable. It used to take secret tapes or a source in a parking garage to allege a cover-up. Now all it takes is a TV segment and a Twitter account. Allowing intelligence officials to rebut Republican talking points is not the...
read moreOPINION: The secret weakness banks must fix
In the late 1990s, large companies began installing newly-developed numeric Secure Shell keys to guard access to the software running their servers. Banks, retailers, governmental departments and other large organizations were increasingly relying on these servers to store sensitive customer information, from bank account balances to health data to Social Security information. The idea was to ensure that only network administrators could access the increasingly automated software tasked with...
read moreOPINION: Take GPS spoofing seriously
FAA, airline industry should retain old-fashioned backups
In today’s cyber landscape, a terrorist posing as a passenger on a commercial flight couldn't easily open up his laptop computer and use GPS spoofing to deceive the flight crew about the location and direction of the plane. Ground-based radars and manual flight controls prevent false GPS readings from going undetected. However, spoofing could become a more serious risk as the U.S. rolls out the GPS-based Next Generation air traffic control system and begins unplugging those ground-based...
read moreOPINION: Risky Business
Threats To The U.S. Won't Go Away, Even If Funding Does
The U.S. intelligence community is not sufficiently funded to perform its mission, and now the community is staring at a 10 percent gouging in January, because Congress and the administration did not agree on a plan to reduce the debt. Ironically, the original intent of the sequester was not for it to happen. It was supposed to force members of Congress to work together to resolve the long term debt problem. The approach failed. Members of Congress remain unwilling to work together, and...
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