Law professor fears cyberattacks will 'increase, continue' in wake of pharmacy, AT&T outages
Change Healthcare attack and AT&T cyber threat false alarm transpire on same day
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Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel for NetChoice, joins 'Fox & Friends' to discuss the growing concerns about cyberattacks and the government's responsibility to 'stand up.'
Thursday’s flurry of outage worries was just the beginning of what one law professor cautioned as impending threats on infrastructure and national security.
"The main concern that I'm seeing is these cyberattacks continue to increase, and the government is just going to try and pass the buck," NetChoice Vice President, general counsel and internet law professor Carl Szabo said on "FOX & Friends" Friday.
"Less than 0.05% of cyberattacks get prosecuted. That means 99%, 99% of cyberattacks go un-prosecuted. So the cyberattacks are going to continue," he added, "and somebody is dropping the ball. And in this case, it's the government."
Early Thursday morning, AT&T service suffered a nationwide outage most prominently impacting Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Miami service areas. A U.S. defense official told FOX News on Thursday that there was "no indication it was a cyberattack."
PHARMACIES SCRAMBLE TO SERVE SICK CUSTOMERS AS ‘NATION-STATE’ BLAMED FOR ONGOING CYBERATTACK OUTAGE
And while the FBI and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said they began investigating the outages, pharmacies across the country reported delays by early Thursday afternoon to prescription orders due to a cyberattack against one of the nation's largest healthcare technology companies, Change Healthcare.
Legal expert Carl Szabo called on the federal government to "do its job" and prosecute those who carry out cyberattacks. (Getty Images)
Change Healthcare, which handles orders and patient payments throughout the U.S., first noticed the "cyber security issue" affecting its networks Wednesday morning on the East Coast before disconnecting its systems.
"Most cyberattacks take about 280 days to trace where they are, what happened," Szabo noted. "We have learned that this is likely a foreign encounter."
"This isn't new," the legal expert further warned. "We saw Sony get hacked by North Korea. We saw the Colonial Pipeline shut down just a couple of years ago with these ransomware attacks. We're seeing ransomware attacks against our hospitals. What we need is law enforcement to go out and do its job. We need less talk, more prosecutions."
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Szabo recommended Americans take technological precautions to ensure their personal information is protected against a future cyberattack.
"Make sure you secure your personal email. Use unique passwords. Activate two-factor authentication because until the government steps up and starts doing its job," he said, "we need to secure ourselves."
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AT&T apologized to customers Thursday for the outage and said it likely came from a software error. On the other hand, Change Healthcare has not given a definitive timeline for a return to service, but said outages are expected to last through Friday.
"This is why America needs to continue to be the leader in technological dominance in the world. We gave away our energy independence," Szabo reflected, "we can not give away our technological independence."
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FOX Business’ Timothy Nerozzi and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.