Where is Elliot Ness when you need him?

Is there room for a big dog on the Cyber Security policing beat?

For folks not familiar with the name Eliot Ness, he is famous for forming a group of FBI agents nicknamed the Untouchables. They were needed during the prohibition days in the United States…. Circa 1927-1931. The Untouchables went after the bootleggers and criminal enterprises responsible for reeking criminal havoc throughout the United States during the ban on alcohol. The most notably bad guy these agents took down was Al (Scarface) Capone, who along with his criminal empire basically ruled Chicago IL.

There is something about the current state of Cyber Security today that reminds me of the prohibition years. We are in an era of unchecked criminal behavior which respects no boundaries or borders. Anyone can digitally reach out and touch someone else when they please, with no unifying police body to hold them accountable for bad deeds done. In my view this is an old fashioned war of good versus evil, white versus black.

A little simplistic for some....perhaps. What is happening today is unfettered criminal behavior which has no precedence or play book to follow. Network access to do harm against another person or entity has never been easier.

Arguably, how we find ourselves in this predicament in 2017 can be debated, but what is not up for questioning is the incentive to be a bad guy. The rewards are high, can be done anonymously and the penalties range from nothing to a wrist slap. The bad guys have as many technology tools as the good guys. Bad guys can be right under our nose, buried inside our own organization. On the other side of the coin, the good guys are out there too, developing tools to fight this cyber war. Problem exists whereby the bad guys get access to these new tools almost right away and shoot back….and thus the circle of insanity continues unabated.  

This past week the WannaCry attack really brought home the state of affairs in Cyber Security. There are unlimited stake holders on the good and bad sides of this play, acting out everyday in the media. There are a lot of really smart people trying to solve these heady issues but there are far more holes in the dike than fingers to plug them. This we can agree upon.

So I am left wondering, how will this good guy - bad guy scenerio play out in the coming years? Will an Eliot Ness stand up on the world stage and form a group of nerdy Untouchables? Is it even possible to think this could happen? I don’t know…..perhaps I'm the crazy one for putting it out there….but with a couple of trillion dollars being spent over the next few years on this cyber war there is no shortage of monetary incentives to try!