Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Cybersecurity Can Halt 80% of Attacks at Best

Kenneth Corbin writes on internetnews.com:

Senior government officials overseeing the nation's cyber defenses told a Senate panel this morning that agencies are doing more to coordinate their far-ranging efforts, but that even in the best-case scenario, the hackers are often one step ahead.

"The harder we can make the general network environment, the easier it's going to be to detect [threats]," said Richard Schaeffer, director of the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate. "We believe that if one institutes best practices, proper configuration, good network monitoring... a system ought to be able to withstand about 80 percent of the commonly known attacks."

The Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security convened the hearing to probe the threat of terrorist attacks against the nation's information and communications systems, though the proceeding ran along the more general lines of cybersecurity, which the panelists described as a scourge that takes many forms.

"There's no silver bullet here," said Philip Reitinger, director of the National Cyber Security Center at the Department of Homeland Security. "We do need to up our defensive game."

posted by Fergie @ 11/17/2009 01:45:00 PM