[May 06, 2010] Experts at Dallas cyber summit say speed essential in fight against high-tech crime Tweet May 06, 2010 (The Dallas Morning News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The Internet can be a dangerous place. But attendees of a Dallas conference that concluded Wednesday plan to make it safer from hackers, thieves, spies and terrorists. And they plan to do it fast. "We're going to have to get very crisp in how we set priorities," Randall Stephenson, chairman, chief executive and president of Dallas-based AT&T Inc., said in his closing keynote speech. "We have to move at a speed that, frankly, these collaborations have not traditionally been capable of." Cybercriminals certainly are speeding up. According to the FBI, the cost of online scams and fraud for Americans more than doubled from 2008 to 2009, reaching nearly $560 million. The organizers of the Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit planned from the beginning for the event to be a launching pad for concrete results. The biggest component of the conference organized by the EastWest Institute was a series of workshops where attendees -- security professionals, government officials and business executives -- worked with industry experts to craft suggestions for how their industries could prepare for cyberattacks. The industries covered were information and communications technology, finance, essential government services, media, transportation, energy and national security. Ed Amoroso, chief security officer at AT&T, was one of the leaders of the tech industry "breakthrough group." He led a brainstorming session in which executives, engineers and developers talked about their biggest security concerns. Teams had to come up with solutions and present them to the entire summit by the final session Wednesday. Amoroso and his team proposed solutions such as an industry group focused on developing security standards for wireless devices and software. Amoroso also said companies need better tools for tracking the origins of the software and hardware components they buy to assemble into final products. "Software you did not write is probably something you cannot trust," he said. Other industry segments also highlighted their cyber weaknesses. After the presentation from the governmental services panel, John Stewart, chief security officer at Cisco Systems Inc., called attention to "the commingling of the Internet for civilian and military uses." He said conventional armies try to avoid bombing civilian targets, but sparing noncombatants will be much harder in a cyberwar in which the same Internet that is used to communicate with troops is also used by hospitals to manage patient care. The transportation group looked at how anonymous hackers can easily disrupt travel, and Jo-ann Olsovsky, chief information officer at Fort Worth-based BNSF Railway Co., proposed requiring computer users to get a "driver's license" for the Internet. For example, every time you use the Internet, you might be required to scan your thumbprint on a small sensor on your computer to check your identity, giving you a "passport to cross into cyberspace," Olsovsky said. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge suggested in a speech that before next year's cybersecurity summit in London, the EastWest Institute create a quarterly or monthly Internet security newsletter to keep the Dallas attendees focused on the problems. Although those initiatives might take months or years, some experts at the conference pointed to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime as a tool already in place to battle cybercriminals. The U.S. signed that agreement in 2001, and the Senate ratified it in 2006. But others said that convention is useful only for battling criminals and thieves. It's less useful for dealing with cyberwar and espionage by national governments, said Scott Charney, vice president in the trustworthy computing group at Microsoft Corp. There's also the danger that the speed of technological evolution will outpace the speed at which industry and government can secure and regulate that technology. Stephenson at AT&T noted that mobile data traffic on his company's wireless network has increased 5,000 percent over the last three years, making wireless devices an increasingly valuable target for cybercriminals. "Everything's going mobile," he said. "With this kind of activity, you know the hackers are out there planning malicious activity on these mobile networks." To see more of The Dallas Morning News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.dallasnews.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Dallas Morning News Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]