The U.S’s last official declaration of war was signed in 1942, yet we have heavily invested ourselves in many major conflicts since, from Korea and Vietnam to Grenada and Somalia to Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of these "unclean conflicts" have suffered significantly in many ways, from popularity and political capital issues to loss of clout and global leadership. Following the breakup of the USSR, our technological innovations and superiority have bred a culture that scoffs and the thought of anyone seriously engaging our country in open, clean conflict. This mentality, to a very high degree, has filtered itself into the DNA of our industrial and corporate business infrastructure, defining how we expect the rest of the world to act and conduct business.This mindset filtered down into our Business DNA, and our innovative corporations that were and are pivotal in building up our national economy began thinking the same way. We are now finding ourselves lashing out with legislation in vain attempts to enforce levels of security controls to protect our national infrastructure. Which will most likely lead to attempts to enforce levels of controls over manufacturing, science, research, medical and other verticals. Will any of these succeed? It is too early to tell. But the simple fact is this. If you get to the point where a problem becomes so big that you need to try to legislate it in order to protect the economy and nation as a whole, you have completely missed what was wrong to begin with. The internet is finally showing us what it can really do, and what that is, we as a nation, and therefore our dominant and innovative business leaders, are completely unprepared for. For the rest of the world, there is absolutely zero need for any semblance of any official clean conflicts, when the internet makes it so easy to conceal outright theft of data, be it millions of credit card numbers and passwords for profit or the theft of industrial intellectual property from a government contractor that thereby cuts a foreign adversary's developmental gap for sophisticated weaponry by years. So, as a country that from high levels views things in black and white, yet has significant expertise in the unclean conflict, why are we losing this new unclean conflict, and how can we adapt accordingly?

Rockie Brockway serves Black Box as the Security Practice Director. With over two decades of experience designing, building and managing systems and networks; auditing and enforcing network security and policy; testing and assessing vulnerabilities and threats; and analyzing business impact and risk, Rockie teams with clients to understand the value and location of business critical data. Rockie specializes in Information Security Risk Management and the inherent relationship between assets, systems, business process, and function. He offers perspectives on how adversaries may find value in that data and then highlights the business impact and ramifications of the theft, disruption, and/or destruction of that information.

Big thanks to Damian Profancik for recording these.

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