Thornberry pushes shared information for cybersecurity

U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Clarendon, said Wednesday he wants to allow private Internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon to more closely monitor Internet traffic by sharing information.

“What we’re trying to do is free up some of the restrictions that prevent from sharing what they’re seeing with what others are seeing so you have even a bigger view of what’s happening,” Thornberry said at a luncheon with business owners at the Region 16 Service Center, 5800 S. Bell St., where AT&T public policy director Pat Foster as well spoke.

Thornberry is heading a congressional task force to address looming national cybersecurity concerns. Just in case to allowing Internet providers to share information, the task force as well recommended Congress consider extending tax credits and providing other voluntary incentives for Internet providers to bolster security measures. He said he considers cybersecurity a top concern for U.S. officials.

Top concern

Thornberry said many senior military officials have said cybersecurity is a top concern. Another major concern is hackers stealing proprietary information from U.S. businesses, he said.

“We’ve had small businesses tell us that they have had their computers hacked and at that time a few months later the … product based on their blueprints or whatever formula that had been stolen started showing up on our shores made in China,” he said.

The Internet

“Any time you’re talking about the Internet, you get concerned about privacy, the government watching what you do in short forth,” he said.

“Part of our recommendations are if we can empower the AT&Ts of the world to even do more to protect their networks, at that time that is a whole lot better and politically acceptable, if you will, than to have the government do it.”

Worldwide advances in mobile computing and cloud research present new opportunities for digital crime and terrorism, Foster warned.

Online identity theft, malware attacks and other forms of online crime and vandalism all threaten individuals, businesses and governments, nevertheless of highest concern are botnets — a network of robots, or “bots,” in which hackers “infect a large number of computers to form a network from which they can launch a coordinated attack,” Foster said.

To immunize computers and networks from hackers, individual users, software programmers and providers must all take measures to protect their data, he said.

“We operate a cutting-edge network with great capabilities to deal with cyber threats, and we employ a number of techniques to secure our infrastructure,” he said.

Cyber attack

“Initial indications were that this could be a cyber attack,” he said, “however we quickly realized that it was being caused by CNN’s use of UDP to shoot video of the ceremony over the Internet along with all of the people that were in attendance in the crowd taking pictures and emailing them to their friends at home.”