PerspectiveCan 'Cyber Moonshot' save America?
It took Pearl Harbor to convince a majority of Americans that the United States that it should enter World War II. It took the Soviets launching its Sputnik satellite into orbit to convince Americans of the need to be in space. It took the bombings of 9/11 to anger and energize the nation into a war on terror. “But can the United States avoid a cyber Pearl Harbor?” Troy Turner asks. “The nation must not wait to find out, and it shouldn’t take such a life-changing event to get the country to understand the need for fast action on cybersecurity,” he writes.
Cyber used to be a word that most Americans associated more with science fiction movies than with their everyday life, but no more. Everything from phones to TVs to traffic signals to water mains to bank accounts, and even hospital bedside medical charts or the temperature control of chicken coops, has some sense of cyber connected to it.
Troy Turner writes in OANow that it took Pearl Harbor to convince a majority of Americans that the United States that it should enter World War II.
He adds:
It took the Soviets launching its Sputnik satellite into orbit to convince Americans of the need to be in space.
It took the bombings of 9/11 to anger and energize the nation into a war on terror.
But can the United States avoid a cyber Pearl Harbor?
The nation must not wait to find out, and it shouldn’t take such a life-changing event to get the country to understand the need for fast action on cybersecurity awareness and development, from the individual level to corporate America to the highest office of government.
That’s according to a think-tank group of cybersecurity experts and federal officials at the first non-military-hosted “Cyber Moonshot” workshop recently held intentionally away from the daily hub-bub of inside the Washington, D.C., beltway and instead in the rolling hills of rural Alabama at Auburn University, where cybersecurity and other homeland security programs have soared in recent years to national prominence.
The Cyber Moonshot name is derived from President Kennedy’s space moonshot program because American government officials, military/defense leaders and cybersecurity experts adamantly advocate the same need for urgency, unity and support.
Some are arguing the situation already has become desperate, with the United States now finding itself much too vulnerable, just as it did when Sputnik flew in 1957.
