Cyber security: Ways to protect yourself from digital theft in today’s technology age

By U.S. Sen. Susan Collins
(R-Maine)
    If you want to see how much technology has changed our world, go to your computer and type, “Internet,” into a search engine like Google. In less than a second, you’ll get more than one billion results! The amount of data the internet can produce in less than a second is astonishing.
    That’s a far cry from the Internet’s humble beginnings in the 1960s as a federally funded, military research project. The Web, as we call it today, grew from that infancy to a fledgling “high tech” wonder in the mid-1990s. Now, it is a digital behemoth, uniting our world, our nation and our communities, delivering information that informs, entertains, enlightens and furthers our lives.
    We are in the midst of a stunning communications revolution, shaped by rapidly changing digital technology, consumer demand, and amazing innovation.
    For every technological advance, however, there also is the risk of misuse and exploitation. Indeed, experts say cyber crime has cost our national economy nearly $8 billion dollars in losses. World-wide, the estimated impact is a whopping $1 trillion.
    As Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, I believe it is important for Congress to take aggressive steps to protect our cyberspace. To bring focus to the growing threat of cyber crime, we recently held a hearing to examine ways to protect American industry and consumers from future attacks. In fact, in the past 18 months, our Committee has held three hearings on this topic. Each time, we confronted a new, sobering litany of cyber crime and cyber attacks. Newspaper headlines paint a troubling picture:
    Recently in New England, computer hacker Albert Gonzalez pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the theft of tens of millions of credit and debit card numbers from the computers of several major retailers, including Barnes & Noble. According to authorities, this may not have been his only major cyber crime. In August, he was indicted for his alleged involvement in the largest credit and debit card data breach ever in the United States. Data relating to more than 130 million credit and debit cards were stolen from a number of corporations, including Hannaford Brothers – a supermarket chain with many locations in Maine.
    In July, the United States and South Korea endured a sizeable denial of service attack against both government and privately owned systems. The attack – launched by an unknown attacker – used a massive “bot-net” of hijacked computers to disrupt six federal agencies, the Washington Post, NASDAQ, and other targets.
    And there has been a significant increase in organized “cyber gangs” stealing money from small and mid-size companies. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reports that wire-transfer fraud rose 58 percent in 2008, with businesses generally forced to swallow substantial losses that they can ill-afford in the current economy.
    These incidents – coupled with the attacks and crimes that we have discussed in past hearings – should prompt the federal government to get organized and make cybersecurity a higher priority.
    Fortunately, there has not been a “cyber 9/11,” but information technology vulnerabilities are regularly exploited to steal billions of dollars, disrupt government and business operations, and engage in acts of espionage, including theft of business and personal data.
    These criminal exploits can be devastating to our national security, erode our economic foundations, and ruin personal lives. We need action on this front.
    Comprehensive cybersecurity legislation must be a high priority for this Congress. The Department of Homeland Security is the lead agency for cybersecurity, and we must ensure that it can carry out that mission by:
• Sharing critical information on threats and vulnerabilities with the private sector since 85% of critical infrastructure is privately owned;
• Encouraging the adoption of best practices and standards across the government, throughout our nation’s critical infrastructure, and in our nation’s business community;
• Generating a strategy that deters terrorists and hostile nation-states from executing cyber attacks that could potentially devastate our critical infrastructure; and,
• Establishing standards and performance metrics that can guide government procurement and thereby encourage manufacturers to incorporate better security into their products for the benefit of both the government and the private sector.
    It is vitally important that we build a strong public-private partnership to protect cyberspace, a vital engine of our economy.