Cybersecurity: Let’s Play to Win

Our plausible cyber future, if we don’t make some changesWe have a cybersecurity problem. You might have heard.It’s even worse than the occasional headlines suggest. Hacking incidents are routine – regarded like car crashes, not airplane crashes. When you think about it, this is kind of fucked up. As Dean Ball recently noted:...the internet is already such a profoundly crime-ridden place. Imagine if gangs went into hospitals in America every week and stole people’s medical records out of filing cabinets. If that happened in the physical world, we’d rightfully question whether government still possessed practical sovereignty. Yet American hospitals are raided constantly in the digital world and we basically tolerate it1. [lightly edited]Cybercrime (broadly defined2) and related activities impose a multi-trillion-dollar burden on the world economy3. And that’s without even considering the national security implications. Who knows what might happen in the event of a “hot” cyber war…