Christian Science Monitor quotes Cyber Statecraft Initiative Director Jason Healey on a new report from the Atlantic Council and the Zurich Insurance Group which warns governments and businesses about potential cybersecurity breaches in the future:
“The internet is highly interconnected and tightly coupled with society, meaning that (as in other such systems) a small failure or series of them in one place can cascade, producing an outsized impact elsewhere,” according to the study by the Atlantic Council, a national security think tank, and Zurich Insurance Company. “While our society’s reliance on the internet grows exponentially, our control of it only grows linearly.”
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“The recent Heartbleed vulnerability demonstrates the main message of the report,” says Jason Healey, director of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and author of the the report, referring to the recently discovered security gap in two-thirds of Internet websites.
“The Internet is so complex and tightly coupled to the real world, it turns out we were all gravely exposed to a cyber-risk in an obscure technology that few understand, and we didn’t see coming,” he adds. “This time it was just passwords, but what happens once the Internet is connected to the electrical grid or driverless cars?”