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SAN FRANCISCO—A group of high-tech CEOs and the presidents cybersecurity adviser Tuesday once again called on private companies to step up their network security efforts and begin treating information security as a business imperative instead of an annoyance.
Representatives from TechNet, a group of about 200 technology executives, said that although there has been an increased focus on security during the last couple of years, enterprises need to do more to ensure that their networks and their data are not exposed.
“I think the overall threat is underestimated because the number of vulnerable points are increasing every day,” said Art Coviello, president and CEO of RSA Security Inc., based in Bedford, Mass., and a member of TechNet.
As it has previously, the group said it is challenging private industry to meet a minimum set of security requirements. However, they have yet to announce what those requirements are.
TechNet also has teamed up with the four major auditing firms—KPMG, Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers—to help companies assess their security vulnerabilities and develop plans to address them. The Internet Security Alliance has also joined TechNets effort.
“The hope here is to shame people in the business world into improving their security,” said Rick White, president of TechNet, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
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During the TechNet press conference here at the RSA Conference, Howard Schmidt, special adviser to the president for cyberspace security, said that he believes both the private sector and the government are making progress on security. However, he said there is still quite a bit of work to be done.
“People are being more diligent with patches and with their configurations,” Schmidt said. “Clearly, time is of the essence. Its taken us a couple or three years to get security into the higher ether of the boardroom.”
Schmidt also said that none of the major network calamities that government experts feared might arise during the war on Iraq ever materialized.
“I think weve done a tremendous job thus far on that,” he said. “Fortunately we havent seen some of the things that we thought we might see coming out of that.”
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