Cybersecurity is for the C-suite, ‘not just the IT crowd’
At least according to Peter Singer, Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution. Writing in Fortune, Singer says many things that won’t make him very popular. A sampling:
- 97% of the Fortune 500 companies have been hacked and likely the other 3% too, they just don’t know it.
- Stop looking to others to solve it for you, stop looking for silver bullet solutions and stop ignoring it.
- Third and most worrisome to me is the notion that this is for the IT crowd. This is for the nerds to handle. That’s how it’s been treated before: “I don’t understand this stuff so I’m going to hand it over to the techies.” First, that’s an abdication of leadership. Secondly, the IT crowd understands the software and hardware, but they don’t understand the wetware. They don’t understand the humans and the organizations and the ripple effects around them that are equally, and in many cases more, important.
- We have to move beyond a situation where it’s considered completely acceptable for senior leaders to say “I don’t use email or social media, I have my assistant print out my emails.” And this describes a lot of people from a former Secretary of Defense to a former Secretary of Homeland Security.
It’s a relatively short article; I recommend it for everyone in the C-suite and on the Board of Directors.
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