After a long silence, Chris Inglis, the nation’s first cyber czar, is emerging with a strategy to cajole, prod and otherwise force the American private sector to start doing what is necessary to defend America’s computers. The heart of the problem has been that defending those systems would require hiring more trained people and fixing known vulnerabilities in software and in general hardening the systems–all of which is expensive. The private sector would rather pay off the ransomware or allow China and Russia to lurk within their systems because CEOs don’t see it as a critical national security problem. That’s the government’s job, they argue. But it will take a public/private sector coalition to start getting serious.
