Earlier this year, Google introduced an optional Chrome browser extension that shows a warning when you log into a website using a leaked username or password. (The technology behind the browser extension is complicated, but Google worked with Stanford University cryptographers to ensure that the login data is encrypted and anonymous.) In just the first month of use, Google found that about 26% of users continued to use their compromised passwords... including ones stolen from financial and government accounts. And those users were 2.5 times more likely to reuse those same passwords elsewhere. To be fair, secure passwords can be some of the hardest to remember. But not changing a password that you know was leaked is asking for trouble. Reusing it is begging for disaster. Chances are good your personal information has already been exposed in one breach or another... and chances are even better that these breaches won’t stop any time soon. Within the next year, the Pentagon will award a $10 billion contract to build its first-ever “war cloud”... It’s commonly referred to as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (or “JEDI”). The basic idea is to create a single cloud capable of supporting real-time decision- making by warfighters anywhere in the world. Currently, the Pentagon operates more than 500 cloud-computing platforms, which require thousands of servers and different cloud providers. It’s a mess, and it makes it A multibillion-dollar strategy...
difficult to quickly access and analyze data. Today, the most resilient systems possessing the requisite speed are being built in the cloud. JEDI won’t just give warfighters real-time data wherever they are... it’ll also vastly improve network speed and resiliency. It will likely become a model for other federal agencies as they pursue their own cybersecurity upgrades. Cyberattacks have plundered more than $1 trillion in intellectual property from the U.S. since 2015. And the risk of cyber sabotage is so high that the Defense Science Board – a committee of civilian experts appointed to advise the U.S. Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters – recommends constructing a second, truly cybersecure military as quickly as possible. The Office of Management and Budget estimates some $3 billion of federal IT equipment will reach the end of its useful life by 2020. In the meantime, more than 80% of annual federal IT spending – approximately $64 billion – is used to keep these aging systems up and running. (That’s almost as much as the U.S. Department of Education’s entire 2018 budget!) The problem is, federal agency IT staffs typically lack the technical expertise and experience to properly vet modernization alternatives and implement selected upgrades. So the Pentagon relies heavily on outside contractors and vendors to do this work for them... companies just like data-breach victims Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. What could possibly go wrong?
American Consequences
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