PRINCIPLE 6 : Efforts to improve cybersecurity must more directly focus on bad actors and their threats.


Why is this important?


Cybersecurity means understanding and mitigating threats in addition to vulnerabilities and consequences. Too often we downplay the importance of managing threats, and do not pay it the attention it needs, because it is a difficult area. Cyberspace, with its global connectivity, poses considerable challenges to those tasked with protecting it. The breadth of criminal activity and number of bad actors make getting ahead of the actors and crafting responses to incidents difficult. At the same time, we must acknowledge the analogies between the off-line and on-line worlds. These are traditional actors and crimes - the difference is the medium - and there are traditional laws and government bodies that have long been tasked with dealing with them.


Cyber threats can be grouped into four categories.


• Crime. This includes cases in which computers are used for criminal purposes such as fraud, extortion, piracy, or theft, or used as tools to commit traditional offenses (e.g., distribution of child pornography or denial-of-service attacks).


• Commercial espionage. This includes cases in which competitors deliberately target the economic intelligence - namely trade secrets - of their competitors. Trade secrets include financial, business, scientific, technical, economic or engineering information, client lists, research documents, prototypes or plans for new products or services, and personnel records.


• Nation-state espionage. This includes cases in which governments intrude into and ex filtrate large amounts of sensitive government data from adversaries’ government agencies and/or military industrial base, or engage in espionage against commercial interests.


• Warfare. This is a discrete category of actions by governments or terrorist groups that constitute acts of war.2


2 “Cyber acts of war” is still being defined as an international term. PAGE 20


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