To Share or Not To Share, That is the Question (Week 9)

Last week I had an interesting conversation with another student in my class about sharing information in the cybersecurity field which led me to think about how cybersecurity information is shared.  If you really think about it, there is a lot of information out there that suggests we are sharing information.  The only downside to the plethora of information that exists is it makes it difficult to learn about new and emerging threats as they are discovered because they are spread across many resources.  Sure, we can spend our days searching and reading through resources, but who has time to do that?  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a one stop shop we could all go to learn and share information about new and emerging cybersecurity threats?

Apparently I am not the only that has thought about this.  Efforts within our government are on the way to develop and enact a cybersecurity bill that calls for the creation of a system for sharing cybersecurity information as it is discovered between public and private entities.  The proposed bill is called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act and is very close to being enacted.  Finally, a one stop shop for us to utilize to learn about new and emerging cybersecurity threats before we learn about them the hard way; when they strike our organization.

Unfortunately, there is one major concern with the proposed bill.  That major concern is privacy.  Some believe the bill will jeopardize our right to privacy since the information sharing system would open a backdoor for companies to legally share their users’ private data (Greenberg, 2015).  This is a major concern we are all too familiar with after the big fiasco with the NSA breaking privacy rules in the past.  Do we really want to go through something like that again?

In order to defend against cyber threats we are going to have to figure out how to share cyber threat information and intelligence without jeopardizing peoples’ right to privacy.  The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act seems to be heading in the right direction, but in its current state may threaten our right to privacy.  Hopefully revisions to the bill will be made before it is enacted and then we can use it to help us fight the battle against cybercrime without infringing on our privacy.

References

Greenberg, A. (2015, April 22). House passes cybersecurity bill despite privacy protests. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://www.wired.com/2015/04/house-passes-cybersecurity-bill-despite-privacy-protests/