I’ve practiced cyber security for 10 years. Not as long as some, but longer than most. I don’t consider myself an expert because I don’t believe the field is mature enough to identify an expert. But I’ve fought many battles with the adversary. I’ve felt elated success and stinging failure. I have my share of war stories. I struggle regularly with ethics and moral dilemmas. I try to stay true to the simple promise I made to myself many years ago: always use my powers for good.
I read a very well written article, “What it Takes to Fight the Terrorists,” on the psychological impact of working counter-terrorism for years. The toll of the long hours. The moral dilemmas they face daily and the stress imposed by the cost of failure.
I am not going to sit here and preach that the stress of an intrusion analyst and network defense operator is the same – it is not. At the moment there are real costs to our failure but none as great as that caused by terrorists. We don’t have to wake up and see the results of thousands of innocents dead and question why we could not stop it.
But I’m afraid that one day we will. As our systems become even more interconnected and a greater number of life-safety and community-critical systems become connected, it is a high possibility that a hacker, intentional or not, will cause large-scale loss of life. See my earlier article as an example. Instead of the smell of the site of a terrorist bombing, maybe we will instead be ingrained with an image of an exploded power plant caused by someone behind a computer half a-world away.
Maybe one day there will be a cyber equivalent to 9/11 and those of us who could have stopped it will plumb the depths of our being to answer why we did not stop it. On that day, as with 9/11, the world will change.
They call cyber security the new counter-terrorism. The new nuclear threat for the next 20 years. I’m afraid that one day this article will be written about us. But until that time, we must learn from our counter-terrorists colleagues – from their courage, fortitude, successes, and failures.