Security industry executives today commented on the news that the United States and Japan will cooperate and share information on data breaches and other cybersecurity events.
Philip Lieberman, president, Lieberman Software (www.liebsoft.com) :
“The joint sharing agreement in cyber defense is a great idea that is long overdue. The need for this cooperation became clear and very public in the Sony debacle that affected both Japanese and American operations. The nature of Asia Pacific relations between Japan and its neighbors (and their disagreements) have moved into conflicts that now play out in cyber space on a worldwide basis. The coordination of cyber threats between Japan and its allies could minimize the consequences and speed up mitigations.
This cooperation agreement will provide benefits to both countries and hopefully will trigger better awareness of cyber defense in Japan among its government agencies, consumers and companies.”
Richard Blech, CEO, Secure Channels (www.securechannels.com) :
“The United States has yet to cure their own epidemic of breaches. This seems like an awfully grandiose idea considering our own tepid results at data security in the United States thus far. We have clearly underperformed. The technology now exists, we need to implement and build our own foundation of security. Advertising collaboration to another country who also needs cybersecurity is like waiving a big flag yelling HACK ME.
The time has come for the security leaders in the private sector and the government to work together using the latest cyber defense technologies to stop the proliferation of breaches. At the very least using technologies like encryption at the deepest level, to mitigate the damage leaving only useless data for the hacker. Our economic partnership with Japan is important, breaching sensitive data in Japan could hurt both countries. Clearly, keeping Japan safe and our relationship intact is important, we simply need a proven plan. Then we can actually share proven solutions to help Japan.”
Igor Baikalov, chief scientist, Securonix (www.securonix.com):
“The Pentagon’s new cyber strategy specifically calls out the threat of retaliation as a principal factor of deterrence. Considering potential for a significant collateral damage, effective response in the cyberspace is severely limited by the quality of attribution, or identifying the source of the attack. Closer cooperation on cybersecurity and information sharing, while beneficial to cyber defense, is actually aimed at improving counter-offensive capabilities: triangulation between cooperating partners makes masking the source of the attack more difficult and increases the accuracy of attribution.”
Stewart Draper, director of insider threat, Securonix (www.securonix.com):
“The pact between Japan and the U.S follows a similar agreement between Russia and China in the practices of cyber threat intelligence sharing and cyber defense posturing. Japan has seen an unprecedented number of cyber attacks from the likes of China and Russia in 2015 which has increased the urgency in which they are looking to form these strategic relationships. These type of agreements are likely to increase as the potential threat of nation state level cyber attacks looms.”
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.