The Weakest Link: Feds Fail with Cyber Security Proposal

There must be a paradigm shift in the way we fight our war on economic terrorists. There are no rules of engagement. And, to paraphrase Gorden Gekko, hackers never sleep.

As the ingenuity, sophistication and bravado of those who invade data depositories grows geometrically, we can no longer allow business, government, or consumers to be uninvolved, uninterested, uninformed or outgunned.

While the business lobbies engage in debates with other special interest groups, regulators and legislators as to harm evaluation, the evolving definition of personal identifying information and how much investment in security is too little or too much, the risk of a real cyber apocalypse increases daily. Imagine hundreds of millions of fraudulent transactions representing trillions of dollars can be launched in the equivalent of an economic denial of service attack, leaving tens of millions of consumers and millions of businesses in financial ruin while countless law enforcement agencies desperately search for answers that will never come. And you thought the current economy was ugly? We’re talking about society facing an extinction-level Depression.

Think I’m being a tad hyperbolic? Think the data apocalypse isn’t possible? Well, riddle me this: If more than 500 million files (that we know about) have been breached and about 17 percent of the individuals in those databases have suffered personal compromises, what happened to the other 83 percent?

There is no Identity Fairy. There is no magic trunk into which all uncompromised identities are swept.

Identities are evergreen. They are currency. They get better with age. And somebody or bodies have been banking them for years.

The time for our federal government to enact a comprehensive, tough and uniform data security and breach notification law is now, not next year and not in the next Congress. Unless and until that happens, there is a void that is being filled by the loosely woven legislative patchwork of forty-seven states, those who hack to expose our flaws, and the ultimate regulators of the American economic system—litigators specializing in class action lawsuits.

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