Page 51 - GCN, May 2017

ideas CYBERSECURITY
Is it time for a public cyber
health service?
IT managers can learn from how the health care community prevents, tracks and resolves public health problems
BY PAUL McCLOSKEY
When Ernie Staten, deputy director of public service for Fairlawn, Ohio, had trouble getting online to do his work, he knew the city had a problem.
Today’s cybersecurity challenges are becoming so complex that govern- ment IT managers and policymakers are beginning to turn to public health for new ways of thinking about pro- tecting agency networks.
The public health and cybersecu- rity communities already share many common tactics, experts say, includ- ing spreading risk across large popu- lations of people, the need to change end-user behaviors and the use of a common language to help ensure safe- ty across overlapping groups.
Those tactics are helping IT manag- ers improve data security in a man- ner that is similar to how the health care community tackles epidemiologi- cal problems, often using the same vocabulary.
“If you think about how cybersecu- rity has been addressed in the past, you heard a lot of biological refer- ences to viruses and antiviruses,” said Elizabeth Lawler, CEO of Conjur, which offers a secure document and access management platform.
She spent 15 years as a public health researcher at the Department of Veter- ans Affairs, but it wasn’t until this year that she began thinking about cyberse- curity as a public health problem.
“In those days, you installed an- interrelated.” Internet-connected ve- tivirus software, and that was suffi- hicles and pacemakers, for instance, cient,” Lawler said. “Today, networks are changing the conversation about
are much more complex, much more
responsibilities for cybersecurity.
“We really don’t use the same kind of behavior modification methods that public health typically uses in improving cybersecurity.”
– ELIZABETH LAWLER, CONJUR
GCN MAY 2017 • GCN.COM 47
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