>> Announcer: From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering Qualys Security Conference 2019,
brought to you by Qualys.
>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE,
we're in Las Vegas at the Bellagio,
at the Qualys Security Conference,
pretty amazing, it's been going on for 19 years,
we heard in the keynote.
It's our first time here,
and we're excited to have our first guest,
he was a keynote earlier this morning,
the author of nine books,
Richard Clarke, National Security and Cyber Risk expert,
and author most recently of "The Fifth Domain."
Dick, great to see you.
>> Great to be with you.
>> Absolutely.
So you've been in this space for a very long time.
>> I started doing cybersecurity in about 1996 or 1997.
>> So early days.
And preparing for this,
I've watched some of your other stuff,
and one of the things you said early on
was before there was really nothing to buy.
How ironic to think about that,
that first there was a firewall,
and basic kind of threat protection.
Compare and contrast that to walking into RSA,
which will be in a couple of months in Moscone,
50,000 people, more vendors than I can count on one hand,
now there's too much stuff to buy.
Do you look at this evolution?
What's your take?
And from a perspective of the CIO
and the people responsible for protecting us,
how should they work through this morass?
>> Well, the CIO and the CFO,
got used to thinking cyber security costs a little bit,
'cause you can only buy, this is 1997,
you can only buy antivirus, firewall,
and maybe, in 1997,
you could buy an intrusion detection system.
Didn't do anything, it just went "beep,"
but you could buy that too.
So you had three things in 1997.
And so that resulted in the IT budget having to take
a tiny little bit of it, and put it aside for security,
maybe 2%, 3% of the budget.
Well, now, if you're only spending 2 or 3%
of your IT budget on security,
somebody owns your company, and it's not you (laughs).
>> And that's 2 or 3% of the IT budget,
that's not the whole budget.
>> No, that's the IT budget.
What we found in researching the book,
is that secure companies,
and there are some,
there's companies that don't get hacked,
or they get hacked, but the hack gets in,
immediately contained, identified, quarantined.
The damage is done, but it's easily repaired.
Companies that are like that,
the resilient companies,
are spending 8%, 10%, we found companies at 12 and 17%,
of their IT budget on security,
and to your point, how many devices do you have to buy?
You look at the floor at any of these RSA Conventions,
Black Hat, or something,
now there are 2000 companies at RSA,
and they're all selling something,
but their marketing message is all the same.
So pity the poor CSO
as she goes around trying to figure out,
"Well, do I want to talk to that company?
"What does it do?"
We found that the big banks,
and the big corporations, that are secure,
have not three, anymore, but 75, 80,
different, discreet cybersecurity products on their network,
most of it software, some of it hardware.
But if you've got 80 products, that's probably 60 vendors,
and so you got to, for yourself,
there's the big challenge, for a CSO,
she's got to figure out, "What are the best products?
"How do they integrate?
"What are my priorities?"
And, that's a tough task,
I understand why a lot of the people want to outsource it,
because it's daunting,
especially for the small and medium-size business,
you got to outsource it.
>> Right, right.
So the good news is, there's a silver lining.
So traditionally, and you've talked about this,
we talk about it all the time too,
there's people that have been hacked and know it,
and people that have been hacked and just don't know it yet,
and the statistics are all over the map,
anywhere you grab it,
it used to be hundreds of days
before intrusions were detected.
Kind of the silver lining in your message is,
with proper investments,
with proper diligence and governance,
you can be in that group,
some they're trying to get in all the time,
but you can actually stop it,
you can actually contain it,
you can actually minimize the damage.
>> What we're saying is,
used to be two kinds of companies,
those that are hacked and knew it,
and those that are hacked that don't, that didn't know it.
Now there's a third kind of company.
The company that's stopping the hack successfully,
and the average, I think, is a 175 days to figure it out,
now it's 175 minutes, or less.
The attack gets in, there's all the five or six stages,
of what's called "the attack killchain,"
and gets out very, very quickly.
Human beings watching glass, looking at alerts,
are not going to detect that and respond in time,
it's got to be automated.
Everybody says they got AI,
but some people really do (laughs),
and machine learning is absolutely necessary,
to detect things out of the sea of data,
75 different kinds of devices giving you data,
all of them alarming,
and trying to figure out what's going on,
and figure out in time,
to stop that attack, quarantine it,
you got to move very, very quickly,
so you've got to trust machine learning and AI,
you got to let them do some of the work.
>> It's so funny 'cause people still are peeved
when they get a false positive
from their credit card company,
and it's like (laughs),
do you realize how many of those things
are going through the system
before one elevates to the level
that you are actually getting an alert?
>> So the problem has always been reducing the number
of false positives,
and identifying which are the real risks,
and prioritizing,
and humans can't do that anymore.
>> Right, right, there's just too much data.
So let's shift gears a little bit about
in terms of how this has changed,
and again, we hear about it over and over, right,
the hacker used to be some malicious kid
living in his mom's basement,
being mischievous, maybe, actually doing some damage,
or stealing a little money.
Now it's government-funded,
it's state attacks, for much more significant threats,
and much more significant opportunities,
targets of opportunity.
You've made some interesting comments
in some of your prior stuff,
what's the role of the government?
What's the role of the government helping businesses?
What's the role of business?
And then it also begs the question,
all these multinational business,
they don't even necessarily just exist in one place,
but now, I've got to defend myself against a nation state,
with, arguably, unlimited resources,
that they can assign to this task.
How should corporate CIOs be thinking about that,
and what is the role, do you think, of the government?
>> Let's say you're right.
20 years ago we actually used to see
the number of cyber attacks go up on a Friday night
and a Saturday night,
because it was boys in their mother's basement
who couldn't get a date, you know,
and they were down there having fun with the computer.
Now, it's not individuals who are doing the attacks.
It is, as you say, nation states.
It's the Russian Army, Russian Intelligence,
Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU.
The North Korean Army
is funding its development of nuclear weapons
by hacking companies and stealing money, all over the world,
including central banks, in some cases.
So, yeah, the threat has changed,
and obviously,
a nation state is going to be far more capable of attacking,
military is going to be far more capable of attacking,
so, CISOs say to me,
"I'm being attacked by a foreign military,
"isn't that the role of the Pentagon
"to defend Americans, American companies?"
And General Keith Alexander,
who used to run Cyber Command,
talks about, if a Russian bomber goes overhead,
and drops a bomb on your plant,
you expect the United States Air Force
to intercept that Russian bomber,
that's why you pay your taxes,
assuming you pay taxes.
What's the difference?
General Alexander says,
whether that's a Russian bomber attacking your plant,
or a Russian cyber attack, attacking your plant,
and he says, therefore,
people should assume the Pentagon will protect them
from foreign militaries.
That sounds nice.
There's a real ring of truth to that, right?
But it doesn't work.
I mean, how could the Pentagon defend your regional bank?
How could the Pentagon defend the telephone company,
or a retail store?
It can't.
It can barely defend itself,
and they're not doing a great job of that either,
defending the federal government.
So, do you really want the Pentagon
putting sensors on your network?
Looking at your data?
No, you don't.
Moreover, they can't.
They don't have enough people,
they don't have enough skills.
At the end of the day,
whatever the analogy is about how
the Defense Department should defend us
from foreign military attack,
they can't.
And they shouldn't, by the way, in my view.
The conclusion that that gets you to,
is you got to defend yourself,
and you can, right now,
if you use the technology that exists.
The government has a role, sure.
It can provide you warnings,
it can provide the community with intelligence,
it can fund development and stuff,
can train people,
but it cannot defend your network,
you have to defend your network.
>> And you have municipalities,
I think it's Atlanta, is the one that keeps getting hit,
there's--
>> Well Louisiana, just the other night,
the whole state of Louisiana government unplugged
from the internet,
because it was being hit by a ransomware attack.
The whole city of Baltimore's been down,
the whole city of Atlanta, as you said.
There's a real problem here,
because people, many of them are paying the ransom,
and they pay the ransom,
and they get their network back right away.
People ask me, "Can I trust these criminals?"
Well you can trust them to give you your network back,
because they have a reputation to maintain.
Think about that.
This whole thing about ransomware
depends on their reputation,
the bad guys' reputation.
If they get a reputation
for not giving you your network back when you pay,
no one's ever going to pay,
so they do give it back,
and sometimes that's a lot quicker, and a lot cheaper,
than saying no and rebuilding your network.
But if we give them the money,
what are they doing with it?
Yeah, they're buying Ferraris
to drive round the streets of Moscow,
but some of that money is going back into R&D,
so they can develop more effective attacks.
>> So it's an interesting take, right,
so most people, I think, would say
that the cybersecurity war
is completely always going to be kind of cat and mouse,
whack-a-mole,
that the bad guys are always a little step ahead,
and you're always trying to catch up,
just the way the innovation cycle works.
You specifically say no, that's not necessarily always true,
that there are specific things you can do
to, not necessarily have an impenetrable wall,
but to really minimize the impact
and neutralize these threats,
like a super white blood cell, if you will.
So what are those things that companies should be doing,
to better increase their probability, their chance,
of, I don't know, blocking--
>> Depends on the size
of the company. >> Absorbing.
>> Depends on the size of the company.
But I think whether you're a small-to-medium business,
or you're an enterprise,
you begin in the same place.
And I do this with all of my consulting contracts,
I sit down with the leadership of the company individually,
and I ask every one of them,
"What are you worried about?
"What could happen?
"What could a bad guy do to you
"that matters to your company?"
'Cause what matters to one company
may not matter to another company.
And you can't spend your entire budget
defending the network,
so let's figure out exactly what risk we're worried about,
and what risk we're just kind of willing to tolerate.
And then, we can design security around that,
and sometimes that security will be outsourced,
to a managed security provider.
A lot of it means getting into the cloud,
because if you're in Amazon or Microsoft's cloud,
you've got some security automatically built in,
they've got thousands of people
doing the security of the cloud,
and if your server's in your basement, good luck.
(laughs)
>> So, as you look forward,
now you said you finished the book earlier in the year,
it gets published, and it's out, and that's great,
but as you said, it's a fast-moving train,
and the spaces develops.
10 years from now,
we don't want to look at 10 years from now, it's way too long.
But as you look forward the next couple, two, three years,
what are you keeping an eye on,
that's going to be, again, another sea change
of both challenge and opportunity in this space?
>> The three technologies we talk about in the book,
for the three-year time horizon,
'cause I can't get beyond three years,
more machine learning on the defense,
but also more machine learning on the offense,
and where does that balance work out?
To whose advantage?
Secondly, quantum computing,
which, we don't know how rapidly quantum computing
will come onto the market,
but we do know it's a risk for some people,
in that it might break encryption,
if the bad guys get their hands on the quantum computer,
so that's a worry.
But one I think most immediately, is 5G.
What 5G allows people to do,
is connect millions of things,
at high speed,
to the internet.
And a lot of those things that will be connected
are not defended right now,
and are outside firewalls,
and don't have end-point protection,
and aren't really built into networks
on a secure network.
So I worry about 5G empowering the Internet of Things,
and doing what we call expanding the attack surface,
I worry about that.
>> Right, Richard, well thank you for taking a few minutes,
and congrats on the book,
and I'm sure within a couple of years
the gears will start turning and you'll put pen to paper
and kick another one out for us.
>> Number 10.
>> All right.
He's Richard, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE,
we're at the Qualys Security Conference
at the Bellagio in Las Vegas,
thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)