Saving the Internet (for the Future): Last year, the Dark Tangent wrote in the DC XXI program that the "balance has swung radically in favor of the offense, and defense seems futile." It has always been easier to attack than to defend on the Internet, even back to 1979 when it was written that "few if any security controls can stop a dedicated" red team. We all accept this as true but the community rarely ever looks at the longer term implications of what happens to the internet if one side has a persistent advantage year after year, decade after decade. Is there a tipping point where the internet becomes no longer a Wild West but Somalia, a complete unstable chaos where the attackers don't just have an advantage but a long-term supremacy? This talk will look at trends and the role of hackers and security researchers.
Jason Healey is the Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council, focusing on international cooperation, competition and conflict in cyberspace, and the editor of the first history of conflict in cyberspace, A Fierce Domain: Cyber Conflict, 1986 to 2012. He has worked cyber issues since the 1990s as a policy director at the White House, executive director at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong and New York, vice chairman of the FS-ISAC (the information sharing and security organization for the finance sector) and a US Air Force intelligence officer. He is a board member of Cyber Conflict Studies Association, lecturer in cyber policy at Georgetown University and author of dozens of published essays and papers. Just in 2013 presented or spoke in Brussels, Rome, Istanbul, Reykjavik, London, Tallinn, Stockholm, Munich, Seoul, Bali, New York, New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.