Having heard about the hacking of personal bank records from numerous sites, including Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase, and Target, one could not fail to be concerned; Even the website Snapchat was the victim of cyber attack: 

All told over the past 12 months, hackers have stolen more than 500 million financial records. We are very vulnerable.

Already Engaged in Cyber-War

"We are not just in a position to prepare for cyber-war", says Curtis Levinson, defense advisor to NATO, "We are already here." We are already under attack and the enemy is stealing our "most precious assets". As the methods and tools of warfare have changed, so have the battlefields.

What will it take for the cyber world to end?  Cyber-attack, electric grid failure, EMP attack? "In our multiverse of network interconnections, Cyber Attack has become the unifying common factor of virtually all elements in our contemporary society," adds Levinson.

Cyber Attack is Unavoidable

In fact, it would seem that as a technological society, we must accept that we are being and will be attacked constantly within cyber-space. Levinson believes that cyber attack is "unavoidable". And once we accept the inevitability of attack, "the process and concepts of continuity and recovery becomes increasingly critical."

Levinson sees what's coming is actually "the merging of continuity/recovery with cyber security". He urges that, we must change "our cyber-security paradigm" and insists that we not only maintain a strong perimeter defense, that "we protect the data, information and command/control inside our networks", as well.

Moving from Reactive to Proactive

What we require is "a paradigm shift from Reactive, not to Proactive, but rather to the state of Constant Incident Response," warns Levinson. We need to follow the lead of the Australian Signals Directorate, Australia's equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States. There are four cyber mitigation strategies that could reduce the potential for cyber-attack at the Organization level by approximately 60 percent.*

Levinson also offers 21 personal mitigation strategies that, when implemented correctly, will greatly reduce the potential for cyber-attack. (We detail that list on our website as well.)

Our forecast is that if they have not already, enlightened organizations will follow this advice and become proactive. In addition, the field of cyber security will have the most global growth of any career field for the foreseeable future. The shortfall in candidates has been felt for years, however as we move into the future, having the right people in this department will be a matter of survival.

* To view this entire list, see The Herman Trend Alert online at www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive_1-21-2015.html.

** We have detailed his entire list at the end of the Trend Alert on line as well. (We could not believe how many of these strategies we had not yet implemented. JLG)

Special thanks are due to Curtis Levinson, CDP, CISSP-CAP, MBCP, CCSK, a private consultant, defense advisor to NATO, and author of ISACA 14 Digital Doomsday. To read the entire report, visit www.isaca.org/Education/Conferences/Documents/NAISRM/ISRM-Digital-Doomsday.pdf 

© Copyright 1998-2014 by The Herman Group of Companies, Inc., all rights reserved. From 'The Herman Trend Alert,' by Joyce Gioia, Strategic Business Futurist. (800) 227-3566 or www.hermangroup.com 

The Herman Trend Alert is a trademark of The Herman Group of Companies, Inc. Reprinted with permission.