New threats to America’s power grid are surfacing daily. The folks at McAfee spend most of their waking hours looking for ways to defend their clients from the never ending barrage of cyber-threats.
On the other hand, non- geeks simply want a worry-free, hacker-free Internet experience and we generally don’t care about the details of the international day to day battle of tech wits.
However, some tech experts on the front lines are alarmed these days. They have known about the foreign threat for years, but they have come to realize something that is both disturbing and revealing about our own willingness to fight back.
Elan Winkler over at McAfee surveyed 200 critical infrastructure IT professionals and discovered an eye opening attitude. These industry insiders blame cost and complacency for our predicament. Winkler states:
“So, if the people in the know, knew, how come we’re still vulnerable? I asked them that question as well. The number one answer: cost. Number two: complacency. No real surprises there; those are the same answers that we used to get from IT departments 15 years ago on why they didn’t have defense in depth technologies set up to protect servers and databases.”
The survey respondents also provided the following comments:
- “There hasn’t been a real incident so no one takes it seriously.”
- “Lack of knowledge and understanding.”
- “Inability of decision makers to commit to security upgrades.”
- “No one wants to pay for security.”
- “False sense of security.”
- “Security competes with other priorities for resources.”
- “We, as Americans, believe we are invulnerable to this kind of attack.”
In neighborhoods across our great country, most power outages are often simply a result of the forces of Mother Nature. For example, a nasty December storm blew through our neighborhood just last night leaving about 700 homes in the dark, well into the night.
Imagine what could happen if our own complacency and budget constraints were to put the entire nation at risk.
Government’s job is to protect citizens from both foreign and domestic threats. Our job is to support them in any way we can.
This pervasive, lazy attitude held by many inside the IT community, renders the term”computer geek” more laughable than it already is.
