I would like to offer my congratulations to the private and public entities that participated in the recent investigation and arrests of cyber criminals in New York City, Ontario, Canada, and London, United Kingdom. A tremendous amount of hard work and dedication from all parties is required to successfully dismantle an international criminal enterprise. The success we witnessed this morning should be used as the gold standard upon which future collaboration between private companies and the International law enforcement community are modeled.
Collaboration at this scale is required to turn the tables on cyber criminals. The impact of today’s events should not be underestimated: this is bigger than any individual arrest. The global law enforcement community has sent a strong message to the individuals who commit these crimes – You are no longer safe to travel and operate outside of your home country, without significant risk of arrest and prosecution. Isolation is a powerful force in the effort to change behaviors. Confined within the borders of their home countries, I suspect we’ll see a change in behavior on the part of some of these criminals.
Continued success with prosecutions will have a lasting effect on cyber criminal behavior… but it is not a silver bullet. Cyber attacks and data breaches are still way too easy for attackers with even a moderate level of skill. We must continue working to make our systems and economy more resilient to attack.
I recently joined RedSeal Networks to work on this specific problem, making it easier for network owners to protect their assets and defend against intrusion and data breach. I’m looking forward to the coming months when we share more of our plan to make network security something that we aren’t just striving to attain, but something we actually have in our toolkit to counter cyber threats.
