Cyber security is broken, and the industry needs to do something about it: Quest

Quest delivers an engaging keynote at the inaugural CSX Asia Pacific 2016.

In his keynote at the inaugural CSX 2016 Asia Pacific conference in Singapore Richard Quest, CNN anchor and host of Quest Means Business, noted that the bad news is worse than ever when it comes to cyber security. He shared that as a consumer, he is not safe when his bank, healthcare provider, and "every credit card I've got"has been hacked. "It doesn't appear that my information has been used criminally or benevolently - or not yet," he said wryly.

This year's victims include Verizon, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Oracle, Snapchat, and Wendy's, he said. "If this is a good year, I'd hate to see a bad one," he noted.

"The US army considers it a new realm of warfare," said Quest, with a full-fledged ecosystem ready to take in hacked information, and that the type of information has progressed beyond that for commercial importance to data that could be of national security and national interest, former US Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton's emails being a case in point.

Quest brought the point home that no one is safe by asking if the audience had sent email or text messages that they would not like their boss to see. "We've all done it," he said.

Worse, data leaks are occurring mysteriously. "We don't know where it came from, we don't know how it got into the public domain, we don't know who is behind it," he stressed, sharing a 1984 picture of himself as a university student that surfaced last year.

"Terrible things are lurking online and we can't get rid of them. Somebody will find them, and somebody else will expose them, and somebody else will expose it to your disadvantage," he warned. "You are sentenced in the court of public opinion."

The problem is one that has to be addressed, said Quest, as corporate survival and jobs are on the line, or worse. He cited high-profile CEO resignations and suicides as a result of security breaches, saying: "Your company will be toast. Your Chief Executive will be absolutely singed."

Quest said that security protocols have not kept up with the reality today. We are still stuck in the era of passwords and security questions to identify who we are, but there are major problems with the system, he said.

"People don't remember the answer to security questions that they put in years ago," he said. A question about a person's first car can still be answered in several different ways, with the model name before the brand, after the brand, or completely missing, he pointed out.

When someone needs a variation of a password, it becomes easy enough to capitalise the letter at the end, or add a symbol to the beginning or the end, such as an 'equals' sign, a hash or a dot - but these are expected by hackers and easily guessed, Quest said, while passwords just get longer and "before long, you are in a mess". "How many of you use the same password or variations of a password?" he asked.

With the Internet of Things already emerging, the risks are growing, with third parties taking over the provision of goods and services, Quest said. While good cyber hygiene should be practised at the individual level, the larger industry has to change, he said, listing more resilient ecosystems and international agreements as some developments that need to happen.

"At the first whiff that (your) technology can't take it, the money will flow away. This is a national security issue," he warned. "You are - the people in this room - the front line warriors in the battle of the 21st century."

Interested?

Read the TechTrade Asia blog post on the CSX Asia Pacific 2016 roundup

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