UPDATED 17:59 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2016

WOMEN IN TECH

The politics of proactive cybersecurity | #GHC16

Just in the past few days, the media has been filled with stories of hacked emails and serious threats to national cybersecurity. Endgame Inc. is taking a proactive approach to protecting the sensitive and valuable data of its customers by not only implementing defensive countermeasures and deterrents, but by taking offensive measures as well, all within the framework of what are often a vague and sometimes non-existent geopolitical guidelines.

Andrea Little Limbago, chief social scientist at Endgame, sat down with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, and Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford), guest host and Women in Tech fellow, live from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event in Houston, TX, to talk about Endgame’s strategy for protecting national and private data, as well as some of the hurdles they are facing in doing so.

The need for updated cybersecurity policy

Because the entire technical landscape is in a constant state of rapid evolution and change, it isn’t hard to imagine that the guidelines and policies governing data security cannot keep up. The “hacker war,” as it is sometimes called, is evolving just as fast as technology itself, so the need for ever-adapting rules of engagement governing cybersecurity has never been more important. Unfortunately, these rules are more than just behind, they are completely antiquated, according to Limbago.

“While technology obviously has been going at an exponentially rapid pace for innovation and change, policy has not,” said Limbago. “A lot of the policies right now still guiding cybersecurity and a lot of security and privacy issues are from the cold war. The framework is from the Cold War and the policy itself is from about 30 years ago.”

‘The best defense is a good offense’

In the cybersecurity world, it is not enough for systems to just be well defended behind firewalls and encryption layers and other data protection measures. According to Limbago, the best security employs offensive and defensive measures, active as well as passive, to not only quickly detect a security breach, but to proactively try to go after the threats that are hostile to organizational systems.

“There is a big discussion about helping a lot of the private sector form more offensive capabilities,” said Limbago. “There is also our discussion of ‘hacking back,’ in which you’re basically going into another external network to either try and take back your data or to retaliate.”

The political and national security aspects of data security

Because cybersecurity is tied to national security, there are worldwide political concerns, so input from the government in regard to which measures are acceptable and which are not is necessary. The government must take a lead role in not only defining the policy, but making sure it is updated and kept in agreement with the current state of technology, according to Limbago.

“I think that is very, very concerning that that’s where some of the discourse is going, so we need the government to step in a bit more and actually provide the parameters for what is acceptable and what is not, but it has to match both the current threat landscape and the current technological landscape,” said Limbago. “You don’t want to go into an escalatory area because cyber does become linked to all other aspects of geopolitics. But we also can’t just sit back and do nothing.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo by SiliconANGLE

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