Are The Russians Hacking Us?!?

Who Cares?

Seriously.  SOMEBODY is hacking us and a LARGE number of people are realizing just how vulnerable our country really is to cyber-attacks.  Who cares if the hacking is coming from Russia, China or Timbuktu?  We have clear and obvious exploits, massive gaping holes in everything from critical infrastructure to our homes and we need to fix these problems.

This focus on the Russians, to me, is akin to pointing fingers at each other in front of a burning building…PUT THE FIRE OUT – then point fingers.

Please.

The trouble is that carrying this analogy forward would reveal a complete lack of plumbing to bring water to the fire, a basic lack of understanding of fire in general and, really, no idea where the water would come from even if the plumbing could somehow be installed.

Us security people have been screaming for action for years now and, finally, the world is feeling our pain.  The trouble is that we tend to scream is Klingon and only other people like us understand anything we are spewing.  We REALLY need to get the business world involved, talk with the people who make things happen and put these complex problems in actionable terminology with trackable outcomes.

Insanity, I know.

Democrats really need to stop complaining that they lost the election due to the Russians and start screaming about the fact that we could easily be hacked by the Russians – or anybody else – at any time.  The Republicans need to learn from their past, stop ignoring the intelligence agencies, and shoot the really large cyber-elephant in the room (isn’t that what they do?!?).

There is a real problem here, it is systemic and it can, and will, bring the U.S. to its knees unless we start meaningful actions now – from the top C-suite to the bottom security guy.

Stop worrying so much about who exactly is hacking us and start worrying about how easy it has become for our country to be compromised.