America's Businesses Losing the Battle Against Hackers
Root9B Technologies CEO and former UBS Paine Webber chairman Joe Grano weighed in on the continued threat of hackings and efforts to boost cyber security in the U.S.
“It’s one of the most serious issues facing America, this sovereign state-sponsored hacking that’s going on – very prevalent. They started out going after U.S. government, now they’re segueing into [the] commercial side,” Grano told the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.
Grano proposed that there needs to be new layers of cyber security in the private and public sectors beyond what already exists.
“If you were to ask and answer the following question: ‘What do JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, Target, Sony, IRS all have in common?’ It’s not that they just got hacked. It’s that despite spending $1 billion on their firewalls, they were exploited. So what it says is, as a country we have to take a whole new level of protection.”
Grano explained that cyber training needs to be expanded all the way to the c-suite.
“The challenge is we have to train our CSOs and our CTOs, they’ve never been trained in cyber. They’re very, very talented people, you know, creating a network, give me a process to transact transactions – now they have to be trained in cyber.”
Grano then weighed in on plans to expand the force taking on the cyber threat in America.
“Cyber Command itself in the United States have announced that they want to train 6,000 more people in terms of countering cyber attacks.”
When asked whether the 2016 presidential election could be compromised by hackers coming out of Russia, Grano responded, “I don’t know about the word ‘compromised,’ but certainly they’re going to try to influence with bogus data and information and create some excitement throughout the situation.”
According to Grano, even the president is acknowledging more needs to be done to address cyber security.
“Even the president has said ‘I’m going to increase the budget by 10% to try to deal with these issues,’ but we haven’t done enough as a nation. Like I said, the NSA is probably our core defense relative to sovereign states.”