Cybersecurity Is a Myth, Says Expert

Here’s the brutal truth, according to Andy Bochman, a cybersecurity expert at the Idaho National Lab. It doesn’t matter how much you spend on cybersecurity, if your mission-critical systems are digital and connected in some way to the internet, then they can never be made fully safe. Bochman and his team have been studying how organizations critical to the U.S. economy and national security can best protect themselves against cyberattacks. Their solution? Identify all the functions whose failure would jeopardize your business, isolate them from the internet to the greatest extent possible, reduce their reliance on digital technologies to an absolute minimum, and backstop their monitoring and control with analog devices and trusted human beings. Nothing else works, he says. It is a strategy which isn’t feasible for purely information-based businesses, it may raise operating costs and reduce efficiency, but it’s the only way to ensure that mission-critical systems can’t be successfully attacked by digital means. Cyber hygiene is effective against unsophisticated automated probes and amateurish hackers, but it won’t work against the growing number of targeted and persistent threats to critical assets posed by sophisticated adversaries.