Tech experts say they hope President-elect Donald Trump will focus further on the issue of state-sponsored cyber hacking, after President Barack Obama's promise to take action over reports Russia had hacked servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta.
"It's really important that we stop talking about these problems and start solving them," Melissa Hathaway, president of Hathaway Global Strategies, told NPR. "That's going to require leadership, it's going to require focused attention."
Hathaway, who has worked on cyber issues during the presidencies of Obama and George W. Bush, said she believes Trump should "focus on three things: energy, finance, and telecom."
She also warned about the dangers of malware, noting there have been banks and utilities already infected from state sponsors and other criminals.
"If I can bring a utility offline through ransomware or through some other means, I can cause them to pay to get it restored," Hathaway, a senior advisor for Harvard University's Cyber Security Project.
Hacking is "arguably one of the biggest threats to the nation," former National Security Agency analyst Jay Kaplan said.
The Obama administration has recommended training 100,000 cybersecurity practitioners by the year 2020 to work on tightening vulnerabilities in the nation's computer networks, both private and government-owned, and Kaplan said crowd-sourcing could help with that task.
His company, Synack, is working with the Pentagon and is now using crowdsourcing to help uncover the government's security holes.
The current efforts are with the Defense Department, Kaplan, as CEO of Synack, said, and he would like to expand on that.
Betsy Cooper, executive director of the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley, said a new administration creates an opportunity for change.
For example, she advocates a cyber workforce incubator in Silicon Valley, so government officials and industry officials can exchange ideas before rotating back to their own jobs after a year or two.
She also suggests a public campaign to make Americans more aware of the importance of using good, strong passwords and practicing other safe computing habits.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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