Possible ‘Catastrophic’ Consequences

Saryu Nayyar is founder and CEO of Gurucul. She said the line between state-sponsored threat actor groups and actual nation-state attacks is a gray area.

“Collecting personal data, especially health care information about individuals and their families, can have catastrophic consequences as this data can be easily used for blackmail and extortion of our nation’s lawmakers, whether this data is sold to our enemies or directly stolen by them,” she said. “The results of these attacks can obviously go beyond personal or financial gain against our lawmakers, and bleed into how they approach public policy and voting. The government must focus beyond just securing our critical infrastructure or military installations, and focus on a widespread policy that leverages the most innovative and advanced technology for monitoring users, systems and data. This includes early warning threat detection, investigation and response systems leveraging identity and behavioral analytics working in conjunction with traditional methods to identify threat actor activity early in the kill chain.

Relying on established and cheaper solutions versus more advanced and customizable solutions will continue to hamper our ability to protect our people, resources, businesses and intellectual property,” she said.