Page 6 - Cyber Warnings August 2017

On top of this we have the ongoing battle between Apple and the FBI in the name of National
Security, which I’ve frequently talked and written about.

“National Security and safety for its citizens in any nation state, especially
the US, is greater, when products from these countries are hardened, not
weakened, containing no backdoors.”

– Gary Miliefsky, Cyber Security Expert

If you could afford any car for your family safety, you probably would choose a Volvo because
it’s hardened to protect you and your family in a crash. It's the opposite of the 1976 Ford Pinto
that had a major weakness where when you hit the rear bumper the car would catch fire and
possibly explode. It’s hard to wake up folks in the US government to understand that GDP,
revenues, taxes and overall citizen happiness increase, when productivity and export sales
increase but who would want to buy a vulnerable phone or a weakened firewall or router
because FBI, CIA, NSA or some other three letter agency asked for back-doors, keys and
weakness in the encryption.

Could it be that national security, corporate security and consumer privacy actually go hand in
hand? Does the British exit from the EU even hint to this fact? Think about it – they wanted
less red tape, less paperwork, they wanted to build better products, control their borders and
increase their jobs. Their national security in the UK will get stronger, not weaker, as a result.
The same holds true with encryption – encryption is a strong border. Should you remove the
border, remove the encryption and go “borderless” what do you get? We all lose our privacy,
corporations continue to hemorrhage data at a cost of billions and national security remains at
risk because it’s easier for the ‘bad guys’ to cross the removed borders and steal the data,
mangle the data and worst case cause a horrific cyber terrorism event such as shutting down a
weak and unencrypted power grid or cause unencrypted airline control systems to crash
airplanes.

It's time to reconsider our approach to national security. If our own government were to defend
its networks with strong encryption, we wouldn’t see breaches like OPM.gov losing 22m
personally identifiable information (PII) records to other nation states such as China. Our
government should start leading the charge believing that strong encryption is good for the
country. It requires more trust of corporations and citizens – because they too deserve to
reclaim their privacy and not be victimized by the bad guys, in the name of a false sense of
security.

And remember, every time someone offers you extra convenient features for free, such as
Google’s search engine or Facebook’s social media products or Microsoft switching their
business model – to make Windows 10 a free upgrade for everyone, they aren’t doing these
things to be nice to you. These companies make money by selling your data to anyone from
governments to advertisers. They have made billions doing so – they monetize you – you
become the product. When you use their products and services at work, you can’t assume the
corporate firewall will ever protect your organization from massive data leakage. When you use
their services on your devices – like your smartphones – you increase the risk that the Bring
Your Own Device (BYOD) offering by your company for convenience has opened the back door

6 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2017 Edition
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