A local expert on cybersecurity spoke to students last Thursday about the challenges facing the Internet security industry in the coming years.
Laura Baker, the co-founder and executive director of CyberWyoming, gave a talk about the unique problems facing law enforcement and city governments as population grows and they integrate the Internet into further devices and systems.
“As population grows, our world feels much smaller,” she said. “Managing larger populations has serious implications for government and our economy.”
Baker says that by 2050, Wyoming’s population will rise to 680,000 people, largely due to the rapid growth of the Denver metropolitan area. As our cities grow, cities will integrate technology into many parts of their operations, creating what Baker calls “smart cities.”
Cities across the nation have already started to integrate technology into their systems, but as Baker said, this comes with its own unique problems. She recounted a situation where hackers compromised the tornado sirens in a town in Texas by remotely triggering the alarms late at night and forcing the city government to pay them a ransom before they shut them off. Despite this, Baker said she feels the benefits are worth the risk.
“We do need smart cities,” said Baker. “We need them to better feed people, to conserve our resources, to reduce congestion, to help with transportation. By following certain strategies, and working to improve our cybersecurity, we can mitigate that risk.”
America is losing the war over cybersecurity, Baker says. Even though America spends the most out of any country in the world on cybersecurity, there are seven competing strategies at the federal level to deal with attacks.
This is unacceptable to Baker, especially when foreign countries like Russia, China, and North Korea spend so much time and effort to hack our systems. Russian hackers were just a few clicks away from disabling many of the United State’s power plants, she said, and they have tampered with countless elections at both the state and federal level.
Wyoming is particularly vulnerable to a cyberattack. The missle silos at F.E. Warren Air Force Base are an enticing target for those trying to compromise America’s defenses, Baker said. However, Wyoming is ranked second worst in the nation at cyber hygiene, a statistic that ranks states on how well they conform to best practices in the cybersecurity industry.
Though military targets are the most valuable target, they are not the most common.
“Nearly half of all cyber crimes are targeted at small businesses,” said Baker. “These big companies, they have whole divisions to defend against cyber crime, but these small and medium sized business, they struggle to adopt these sorts of strategies.”
Even though things look bleak right now, Baker argued our current situation is not a failure, but an opportunity.
“Vulnerability is not weakness,” she said. “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”
Baker told the students listening that cybersecurity is a growth industry, and that regardless of major, every student should make an effort to learn how to defend themselves online.
