A large delegation from NATO visited McAfee to discuss information warfare as it relates to emerging markets.
Based on my most recent travels throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia I presented on various information warfare topics to the NATO delegation. We explored information warfare from a defensive and offensive perspective looking at major actors such as nation-states and minor actors such as hacktivists. We covered a wide variety of attack motives that we’ve been seeing in the field such as extortion, sabotage and information theft. We also covered examples of the convergence of kinetic and non-kinetic warfare.
While this topic is relevant to the private and public sectors, the interest level of the NATO delegation was firmly seated in public. Therefore much of the Q&A time was spent discussing policy in the form of public-private partnerships to share information, litigation reform to reduce fines and regulations in favor of positive incentives, depreciation acceleration to spur investment in security capital, reinsurance to invigorate the cyber insurance industry, and investments governments can make in security competitions, and scholarships to promote math, science, and technology within schools.
Cyber has become a great equalizer, and a country need not be a nuclear power or even industrialized to mount a significant, asymmetric attack leveraging tools like botnets to act as a force multiplier. Awareness, education, international partnership, and more tightly integrated security controls were the primary takeaways.
Tags: Emerging Market Security, NATO
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