THE BATTALION: How do you define cyber terrorism?
dAVIS: Well, let’s start with terrorism. Now, terrorism is trying to intimidate through violent actions or the threat of violent action. It’s trying to influence the society or political situation. To follow with cyber terrorism — you have to have the same intent to harm or alter what is going on in the society.
THE BATTALION: How can both the public sector and the private sector in the United States better protect themselves from cyber attacks?
dAVIS: The real point of potential that I think it comes down to, you’ve got government on one hand and private business on the other. Private business, they’re worried about the bottom line, and when you start trying to secure things, whether you are trying to secure things physically or from a cyber standpoint, it costs money. So businesses are going to do, probably, the minimum that they need to to stay secure. The government is spending tax money so they’re not so much worried about the bottom line, unfortunately … So what we really need is a partnership between the private and the public sector, especially when you look at the information infrastructure, with everything linked. This phone that we are talking on now, the computers that we use, it’s all linked through the Internet. It’s so easy for a bad apple to do things now. I mean, they can do it off their cellphones. So it’s very important that, again, the private and public sector work together to try to sting this tide of cyber crime.
THE BATTALION: Do you believe that the partnership of the public and private sector will be a reality in the future?
dAVIS: There’s already cooperation between the two. At the same time, when you start thinking about our freedoms and such, I don’t know if you necessarily want the government regulating everything in the cyber world. You kind of have to have that balance of security and freedom. You don’t want the government just coming in and regulating everything. That kind of screams against free enterprise and good ideas. At the same time you have to have some type of cooperation — I think that’s the best words — with the private sector, maybe some sort of standards too. That’s one thing that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to do, they are trying to set standards to private businesses and other entities can work toward without the government coming in and saying, ‘You will do this.’
THE BATTALION: When you say standards, what do you have in mind?
dAVIS: It could be training, it could be standards of data security, like, ‘This is what you need to do to secure a bank account.’ It could be really anything. Training definitely, because you want your people to notice an attack.
THE BATTALION: What else do you have to say on this subject?
dAVIS: I think that this cyber tech stuff isn’t being blown away. The more connected we become, the more critical it is to know how to secure our nets. I’ll tell you one of the biggest threats, and a lot of experts say this, that insiders are the biggest threats. In other words, the person who works at that place ­ — say a person who works at that power plant. Say they don’t get promoted, well maybe they are a computer programmer or whatever and even though it may be a closed system — they may bring in a thumb drive to work one day and have complete access to unleash a virus, worm, or some other kind of Trojan horse or something and insert it into that system. So insiders are one of the bigger threats that we face.