Recent cyber attacks, including NotPetya last June, have been destructive to American organizations, causing them hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Other crimes, such as the cybersecurity breach at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015, have reportedly supplied key information to states like China’s that can be used to blackmail American citizens operating with sensitive intelligence.
As a result, it is imperative that U.S. governments become better at defending their networks, Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer at CrowdStrike told News at the Munich Security Conference.
“The U.S. administration is actually exceptionally vulnerable,” he said.
Despite the “very good” intellect operations in the U.S., “their acquisition process is so archaic that they are not really able to buy the technologies they need to protect themselves fast enough,” Alperovitch said.
However, it is not just the systems in the U.S. that are vulnerable to cyber attacks and need to be changed. NotPetya and WannaCry were two of the newest attacks and they affected companies worldwide.
“The U.S. is not great at defense but in my trips overseas I realized that everyone else is even worse. So this is not an area where anyone, including their adversaries, is good,” Alperovitch added.
He suggested that association networks should be able to do three things: Detect there’s an enemy in about a minute; study that threat in about 10 minutes; and clean up that attack within an hour.
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