Page 28 - Cyber Warnings

Cybersecurity Regulations in 2017

The Enterprise View
By Tom Gilheany, Product Manager, Learning@Cisco

2016 was a big year in cybersecurity news – and not in a good way.

The world experienced about 3,000 publicly disclosed data breaches in 2016. That exposed
about 2.2 billion records. Yahoo made headlines for experiencing the largest hack in history.
That has Verizon reconsidering its offer price for the search and media giant.

Distributed denial of service attacks illustrated the security risk involved with connected devices.
These attacks also demonstrated how the Internet of Things can be enlisted to be repurposed
for malicious use or taken over for ransomware, take remote control of connected devices or
exfiltrate data.

Ransomware became even more prevalent last year too. A Deloitte 2016 report indicated that in
the first quarter of last year alone there was an average of more than 4,000 attacks per day.
That was a 300 percent increase from the 1,000 ransomware attacks observed on average per
day in 2015. And then there was the U.S. presidential election. Cybersecurity, or the lack of it,
was center stage for that as well.

That included the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election
campaign. Then, in January, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a report
that said “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the
U.S. presidential election” with a goal to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,
denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” This report
suggested the Russians did so using covert intelligence operations, including cyberactivity, in an
effort to impact election results.

Whatever you think of all that, the developments noted above make clear that our incoming
president and other politicians this year will be challenged by – and likely pushed to respond to
– the problem that is hacking.

Of course, cybersecurity already has been the subject of significant discussion in business,
government, and personal privacy circles.

Recent developments

During his administration, President Obama passed the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. That aimed
to create a framework for the voluntary sharing of cyberthreat information between private
entities and the federal government, as well as within agencies of the federal government.

28 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2017 Edition
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