Page 26 - Cyber Warnings

Addressing the government data security problem

By Marcelo Delima, Global Product Marketing Manager at HPE Security Data Security

Throughout federal, state, and local governments, the digital revolution is driving an exponential
growth of high-value data. Personally identifiable information (PII) is collected on government
employees, taxpayers, students, retirees, military personnel, and anyone doing business with
the government.

This data is a valuable resource that has the potential of transforming the government as we
know it. Big data analytics could allow for better allocation of resources and more efficiency;
transparency initiatives could allow better citizen services and more accountability, and data
sharing could enable better coordination between agencies in key fields such as national
security, healthcare or education.

But this same data is also highly prized by cyber-criminals, malicious insiders and nation-states.
The challenge is how to protect the data, but in such a way that it can still be safely shared and
analyzed by data scientists in its protected form.

Government under attack

Federal and state government agencies disclosed a total of 203 data breaches between 2010
and 2016, with 72 breaches in 2016 alone. In the majority of cases, government breaches
involved personal information such as names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates.

The United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) alone experienced the theft of PII
and security clearance background investigation information for 22.1 million individuals in 2015.

The growth in data breaches is a proof that the most common cybersecurity measures—
firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, antivirus software, and other security technology
operating at the network and endpoint layers—are increasingly ineffective against advanced
cyberattacks, leaving gaps where data is exposed.

The data security challenge

Government entities have some of the same challenges faced by private sector corporations,
including:

- Big data and data sharing: Government agencies are challenged with providing better
citizen services and being more transparent, but that requires increased data sharing
between agencies and with contractors. It also requires big data analytics and adoption
of new technologies to manage the "data lake" such as Hadoop.

26 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – May 2017 Edition
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