Cybersecurity Boot Camp Draws Congressional Staffers to Stanford

by  Steve Fyffe,  Stanford Report

A bipartisan group of Capitol Hill staffers last week attended Stanford University’s second Congressional Cyber Boot Camp to gain insights on pressing cybersecurity threats and ways to mitigate them.

“Whatever level you’re worried about cybersecurity, you should be more worried,” LinkedIn co-founder and Stanford alum Reid Hoffman warned the bipartisan group who staff key congressional oversight committees, during a keynote address with Stanford professor and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

FireEye president Kevin Mandia warned of the growing prevalence of state-sponsored cyberattacks, with China and Russia among the main culprits. Mandia characterized the shortcomings of the U.S. cybersecurity effort as “we’ve spent billions of dollars on defense, but I don’t think we’ve raised the cost of offense a dollar.”

Hoover Institution research fellow Herb Lin said cyberattackers have a clear edge over defenders, in that pinpointing flaws in commonly used software is akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. “Each one of those lines of logic might have a flaw that can be exploited by an attacker to break in,” noted Symantec’s Carey Nachenberg.

Meanwhile, University of California, San Diego professor Stefan Savage said there is overemphasis on laptops and servers as hackers’ primary targets, when everyday objects such as cars are vulnerable because most processors “look nothing like computers.” Center for International Security and Cooperation co-director Amy Zegart said she wants to expose congressional staffers to various technology, legal, technical, and policy specialists in order to expedite the learning process and enable cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Read the report