There’s been much debate about the National Security Agency’s program, “Perfect Citizen,” which is designed to protect the country’s most widely used and critical infrastructure such as electric grids and nuclear-power plants from emerging cyber attacks. While one camp says monitoring systems is an intrusion into domestic affairs, another sees it as an important step for combatting impending security threats that could cause significant damage to our government, citizens, and national economy. In either case, it is not an actual, proactive solution to securing our critical infrastructure.
In the article, “U.S. Plans Cyber Shield for Utilities, Companies,” the program calls for the NSA to monitor and detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running our critical infrastructure. While much still has to be worked out, the surveillance would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by any unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack. The information could also serve as a data bank to help companies who call upon the NSA to help investigate cyber attacks, as Google did after the Aurora attacks last year.
With increasing concerns around security threats, I commend the government for taking action to protect our nation’s most critical infrastructure from such attacks. However, at this point, the plan is nothing more than a surveillance program that monitors, processes and stores information; not a solution that proactively prevents attacks against systems that run important infrastructure.
Politics aside, the goals of the program are to better understand the nature of cyber threats to national security networks and find ways to close the security gaps that make them vulnerable to such attacks. Rather than simply monitoring suspicious activities that could evolve into a full-scale attack, additional security technologies–most notably application whitelisting — will be required if we are all going to better protect the infrastructure that is critical to our national security.