Special to WorldTribune.com

The cost of cyber attacks reached one half trillion dollars globally last year with no end in sight, said former CIA analyst Jack Caravelli at a conference in Switzerland.

An underground growth industry driven by the expanding ranks of amateur and professional hackers steal government secrets and sensitive corporate information, he said. A dangerous subset are cyber terrorists who use the Internet as a recruiting tool.

Senior government and law enforcement officials, joined by executives from industry and business, took part in a conference “First Cyber Forum: Management Challenges” held last week at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland.

Co-chaired by Dr. Caravelli, an editor at WorldTribune.com and Geostrategy-Direct.com, the conference was designed to facilitate exchanges between major Internet users and technical experts in both the private and public sectors.

The Internet was designed originally as a game changing way for millions to communicate anything from simple messages to the exchange of large volumes of information, Caravelli said. It also was intended to be open and globally accessible, a revolution in human communication.

Those same positive and indeed revolutionary benefits have been weaponized by hackers who abuse this openness and use the Internet for cyber warfare, terrorism and crime.

News reports worldwide have described aggressive cyber attacks launched from not only the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), but also from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran against Western governmental and corporate interests.

Caravelli noted the damage to corporations such as Sony and Saudi Aramco, both victims of massive cyber attacks, as well as governmental entities such as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management which ignored warnings from its experts and suffered the massive loss of millions of personnel and security files.

In this environment he said that the gold standard for those with cyber security responsibility should be data confidentiality, integrity and availability.

Dr. Liam Fox, a member of the UK Parliament and former chief of the UK defense forces, gave the keynote address, emphasizing that most Western nations do not have a well developed plan for confronting cyber attackers.

Cyber attacks have emerged as a key form of asymmetric warfare in that the attacking group or nation can inflict considerable damage on its target with little fear of retaliation, he said. Therefore, he concluded, “we need to spend more on things we cannot see.”

Many cyber attacks have exploited vulnerabilities created by sloppy or inadequate internal security practices, said Clay Stewart, a former Defense Department official. Stewart said senior leaders must take the lead in shaping a culture where all employees in an organization have responsibility for maintaining appropriate security practices.

Florian Schutz, a senior manager from the Swiss defense firm RUAG, picked up on this theme in discussing the consequences of the Edward Snowden case. Schutz showed how the revelations by Snowden, a former U.S. Government contractor and IT specialist with sweeping access to some of the most sensitive U.S. secrets, revealed the scope of U.S. surveillance operations at home and abroad.

Schutz underscored how a corporate insider also could cause similar and significant harm through cyber espionage.

Representatives from the U.S., UK, Italy and Switzerland agreed that an international agreement on standards and policies is unlikely in the near term, resulting in expanded challenges for maintaining cyber security.

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