Cybersecurity group spreads to Europe

LONDON — There isn’t a colored alert system indicating the level of threat faced by global information systems, but if there were former White House security director Paul Kurtz reckons it would currently be shining a bright orange for “high risk.”

“It’s not appropriate to say the sky is falling, but I do think we are taking information security for granted,” Kurtz said during an interview in London on Friday.

It’s this concern that prompted Kurtz to come to Europe last week in his current role as executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance (CSIA), a public policy advocacy group focused on cybersecurity issues. CSIA was launched in February of 2004 by a handful of IT security firms, including RSA Security, McAfee, and Symantec, and it is now seeking to expand its membership in Europe and to begin tackling issues across the Atlantic.

Industry representatives approached Kurtz early last year, while he was still serving as special assistant to the president and senior director for critical infrastructure protection on the White House’s Homeland Security Council, making him responsible for both physical and cybersecurity.

“At first I thought Washington needs a new association like a hole in the head, but then after I thought about it I elected to leave the White House,” Kurtz said. Part of the reason was that cybersecurity had been “put in the backseat” while physical security took precedence, he said. “It was very frustrating.”

At CSIA, Kurtz and the member companies want to work on global cybersecurity issues such as privacy and information integrity, as well as help develop policies like notifying the public when their information has been exposed in a data breach. The group is focused on enterprise issues and it’s CEO-driven — its board comprises executives from McAfee, Symantec, and RSA, among others.

“The bottom line is that the private sector is going to get attacked,” Kurtz said.

The U.S. government isn’t taking cybersecurity seriously enough, in fact it reduced research and development spending for the area in its latest budget, he said.

One possible reason behind the lack of concern is that some in the government still believe that cybercriminals are “pimply faced teenagers” and not organized crime gangs, according to Kurtz.

But for the private sector, the threat has become much more real as recent high-profile cases have managed to grab headlines and shake consumer confidence. In just one recent incident, it was revealed earlier this month that some 40 million credit card numbers may have been accessed by a hacker who infiltrated the network of a company that processed payment information for MasterCard International.

“As we’ve seen over the last few months, a lack of attention to detail can spill into the papers,” Kurtz said.

And consumers are becoming more aware of the threats. According to a recent CSIA survey of likely U.S. voters, 97 percent of the those polled said that they rate identity theft as a serious problem, while 93 percent said they saw spyware as a serious concern. Furthermore, fear of identity theft is keeping 48 percent of those polled from making purchases online, the survey found.

“I mean half of the market is not engaged in e-commerce!” Kurtz said. “It goes to show that these problems have potentially long-term implications.”

By motivating the private sector to take action against cyberthreats, CSIA hopes its work will have a knock-on effect on public sector practices.

“We need to raise these issues, but at the same time we need to make sure that the government doesn’t overreact,” Kurtz said.

Over regulation is a concern for the industry. The sector is looking for strong government leadership on IT security issues but at the same time many of those polled by the CSIA don’t trust the U.S. Congress to do what’s right for the Internet, Kurtz said.

“There’s a lot of debate about the roles and responsibility of government and industry in information security. This is one of the things we are trying to work out,” he said.

Overall, the CSIA is promoting a holistic approach to security and is willing to work with the variety of concerned players, Kurtz said. In Europe, for instance, it has begun working with agencies such as the E.U.’s Article 29 working party on data protection.

“We are in Europe to take the next step and really think about these issues more broadly,” Kurtz said. The association expects to eventually extend into Asia, with the goal of establishing a global organization.

“So often the U.S. rides in to ‘save the day,’ but we do not want to bring a U.S. solution, we want to bring a harmonized solution,” Kurtz said.