Shuyuan Mary Ho Metcalfe

The first time the bipartisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board dissected a National Security Agency surveillance program, it found fundamental flaws, arguing in a January report that the NSA’s collection of domestic calling records “lacked a viable legal foundation” and should be shut down.

Cybersecurity bills are normally looked at as being terrible for privacy. But a new one being considered by the Senate has a bonus—it’s still bad for privacy, but it could also kill whatever is left of net neutrality.

Portions of the cybersecurity bill that the Senate is considering, which is modeled on CISPA, could be construed to subvert net neutrality, according to a coalition of civil liberties groups.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012—the last cybersecurity bill considered by the Senate—had a clause that said nothing in the bill could be “construed to authorize or limit liability for actions that would violate the regulations adopted by the Federal Communications Commission on preserving the open Internet, or any successor regulations thereto, nor to modify or alter the obligations of private entities under such regulations.”

CISA has no such clause. The group notes that terms popular throughout CISA, such as “cybersecurity threat” and “countermeasure” are poorly defined and could be used by service providers to harm the free and open internet.

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Cybersecurity threats are a vital issue for the nation, and like the Defense Department, businesses must own the problem to successfully carry out their missions, DOD’s top cybersecurity expert told a forum of businesspeople.
Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency and chief of the Central Security Service, at Bloomberg Government’s Cybersecurity Summit in Washington.

Corporations must successfully deal with cybersecurity threats, because such threats can have direct impacts on business and reputation, Rogers told the business audience. “You have to consider cybersecurity threats every bit as foundational as we do in our ability to maneuver forces as a military construct,” he said.

“When I look at the problem set, I’m struck by a couple things that I highlight with my business counterparts,” Rogers said. “Traditionally, we’ve largely been focused on attempts to prevent intrusions. I’ve increasingly come to the opinion that we must spend more time focused on detection.

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Cyber crime is a growth industry that’s stripping the global economy of billions of dollars each year. The total losses have been the subject of debate, but a study released this week says cyber crime could cost the global economy as much as $575 billion a year.

The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates the likely annual cost to the global economy is more than $445 billion, a figure that includes both the gains to criminals and the costs to companies for recovery and defense. The maximum annual losses could be as high as $575 billion, according to the report sponsored by security software company McAfee.

The cost to individuals whose personal information was stolen is estimated at $160 billion a year. Forty million people in the U.S., roughly 15 percent of the population, have had their personal information stolen by hackers, according to the study.

G20 nations tend to bear the burnt of the losses, according to the study. The four largest economies in the world–U.S., China, Japan and Germany–lost $200 billion due to cyber crime in 2013, according to the report.

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A computer program has successfully passed the “Turing Test.” Alan Turing, the famous mathematician and computer programmer who worked on cracking the Enigma code during the Second World War proposed his test in a 1950 paper. In the paper he suggested a practical way in which you could test whether a machine could think. His original proposal involved taking three people, a man, a woman and an interrogator and had the interrogator ask unrestricted questions to one of the subjects chosen at random and try and determine whether they were talking to either the man or the woman. The interrogator was separated from the test subjects and conversed with them via text through a computer. The subject was then replaced with a computer and the interrogator went through the same process. The machine would win if the interrogator guessed the answer wrongly as many times as they had done when a human was answering.
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If only computers themselves were smart enough to fight off malevolent hackers.

That is the premise of an ambitious two-year contest with a $2 million first prize, posed to the world’s computer programmers by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known by its acronym, Darpa. It is the blue-sky, big-think organization within the Defense Department that created a precursor of the Internet in the late 1960s and more recently held a contest that spurred development of self-driving cars.

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Some of the largest U.S. companies are looking to hire cybersecurity experts in newly elevated positions and bring technologists on to their boards, a sign that corporate America is increasingly worried about hacking threats.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, PepsiCo Inc, Cardinal Health Inc, Deere & Co and The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) are among the Fortune 500 companies seeking chief information security officers (CISOs) and other security personnel to shore up their cyber defenses, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

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There is a general lack of information on what cyber intelligence is and how to appropriately use it. There are a few resources out there but cyber intelligence is more often thrown around as a buzz word for company statements and contracts than it is actually defined and used. Here’s a user-friendly explanation of what it’s all about.

Remember, everything you share online is there forever, no matter how much you think you have deleted it, it will always be there, somewhere. That includes instant chats, instant messages and yes indeed, even text messages. There is no shredding that information as you would your old bank statements. Savvy scammers, stalkers, and general trolls can find your most private information. From here out, be extremely careful with what you share. Here are some best practices you need to consider…

The Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (UPPR) together with the Centre for Information Security Research and Education (CIARE) conducted the “Cybertech 2014: Towards the future” forum. The conference, which took place over a full day, had important presenters like Dr. Shuyuan Mary Ho Florida State University, among other prominent professionals in the information technology.

“The UPPR is very proud to have been designated (in June 2009) as the first and only National Center of Academic Excellence in Teaching in the Information Security (CAE / IAE) in Puerto Rico by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),” said Ernesto Vázquez Martínez, Vice President of UPPR. “We are also leaders in the area of ​​cyber education.”