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policymakers appreciate the importance of the issues.
Eggers calls "strong devices" the centerpiece for security.
"We want to see those strong devices out into the marketplace, so they are ubiquitous," he says. "We also want to
get the attention of policymakers."
Eggers says pricing - and the entire cost versus value
issue - is a challenge, although he believes that "the cost
issue will resovle itself over time." Most significantly, the
Chamber's focus is supporting "certainty and protections,"
especially so that multinational producers can rely on a
cyber program that is uniform wherever they operate and
sell merchandise - what Eggers calls a "baseline that is
good for industry and for the ecosystem."

URGENT ATTENTION NEEDED

Analyses, such as the Cyber Incident & Breach Trends
Report from the Internet Society's Online Trust Alliance,
cite weak spots that have allowed ransomware, data
breaches and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)
attacks. Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report
2019 notes that DDoS represented 80% of IoT-based
attacks last year. And Symantec notes "there are signs
that the objectives and methods of IoT attackers are
becoming more diverse."
"We're not trying to cry wolf " about the threat of physical
world IoT threats, writes Candid Wueest, senior principal
threat researcher at Symantec Security Response in a blog.
"Those types of attacks will likely grow in frequency."
A CTA study found that the top use of AI in 2018 was
in cybersecurity, detecting and deterring security intrusions. According to CTA, 44% of all AI applications were
used to automate cybersecurity tasks by using deeplearning algorithms to find patterns in data and to detect
vulnerable user behaviors.

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INFORMATION
CREATING AWARENESS
October is National Cybersecurity
Awareness Month (NCSAM), when government agencies and private industry
raise awareness about cybersecurity.
According to the Department of
Homeland Security, the NCSAM 2019
conference is stressing the importance of taking proactive steps to
enhance cybersecurity at home and in
the workplace. This year's theme -
"Own IT. Secure IT. Protect IT." - focuses
on key areas: citizen privacy, consumer
devices and ecommerce security.

CAPITALIZING ON THE CLOUD'S
SECURITY CAPABILITIES

All these industry and government cyber initiatives are leading to the cloud, says Michael Nelson, a Washington policy
executive specializing in internet security. "Cybersecurity
models will have to change for the Internet of Things," he
adds. Nelson has worked at the White House, on Capitol
Hill, for major tech firms and taught internet security at
Georgetown University. "We should think of it as a "cloud of
things" rather than IoT because it's "all about data security,
not network security. And security is in the cloud.
"IoT devices are often so simple that you cannot provide all
the security features within them," Nelson continues. "The solution is to create cloud-based gateways to control access to the
device and also to prevent them from being used in attacks on
other devices on the internet." He also cautions against "misguided attempts to impose security checklists on every device."

I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

9/9/19 7:08 PM

i3 - September/October 2019

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