We’re thinking about cybersecurity all wrong
Michael Daniel has a unique perspective on today’s chaotic world of cybersecurity. Fresh off a four-year stint as President Obama’s top cyber advisor, Daniel is now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit team of cybersecurity companies building a platform for sharing information about common threats. MIT Technology Review caught up with Daniel at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas last week. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.
You’ve seen the cybersecurity challenge from the perspective of both the government and now the private sector. How would you describe the moment we are in right now?
Where we are right now is that more and more countries are beginning to incorporate cyber capabilities into their tools of statecraft. We need to recognize that it is going to become a tool of statecraft, not just for the U.S. and the high-end players like Russia, China, Israel, and Great Britain, but for almost everybody. As a result, we need to begin to think through how we set up norms of behavior and rules of the road, so that this is not destabilizing.
Criminals as well as nation-states are getting more sophisticated in their cyber operations. What role can the Cyber Threat Alliance play in addressing this?
At its broadest level, CTA is an information sharing and analysis organization, one that is focused on the vendor and the cybersecurity provider community. There’s not really another organization that does this sort of work. Fundamentally, CTA is about doing two things. First, can we change how competition occurs in the cybersecurity industry to make it more beneficial to the whole? Instead of continuing to compete on “my inadequate pool of data is bigger than your inadequate pool of data,” we need to have shared our pools of data, and the competition should be on “I do better things with the data”—I’m faster, or I integrate with your company better, or I understand your business model better—whatever it is. That’s a higher-value level of competition. Everybody will be better off.
Second, by combining the information we can start to actually map out more effective ways to disrupt the bad guys, and do it across their entire business process. This is not about a kid in his basement; that’s not the real threat.
