Recent polls show that while long-term topics such as national defense, the budget, and healthcare continue to be of importance to electoral races, voters feel that cybersecurity should be a primary concern to candidates in the 2016 presidential race.
Much of the campaign rhetoric has focused on the current Administration’s actions relative to cybersecurity. President Barack Obama addressed the need for a government lead on what he called “an issue that is not going away.”
“It is going to be more and more important, and it is going to be very challenging. It’s challenging in part because the Internet itself, the architecture of it was not intended to carry trillions of dollars of transactions and everybody’s personal information,” stated Pres. Obama. “It was designed for a couple of professors to trade academic papers. And so the kind of security that we were looking for was not embedded into the DNA of the Internet.”
He added, “And the vulnerabilities are significant and they are being exploited by not just state actors, but also non-state actors and criminal gangs at an accelerating pace. So this is something that from a national security perspective and from a business perspective we’re going to have to continue to concentrate on.”
Public View
American citizens agree, with a majority (64 percent) of respondents to a PKWARE survey saying that they feel the 2016 presidential campaign will be subject to hacking and that presidential candidates should offer up better solutions on cyber issues. According to the survey, improved defense against hackers (34 percent) ranks as the topic most voters would most like to see the presidential candidates debate, followed by identity protection for Americans (26 percent) and collaboration with private business on safeguarding the Internet (22 percent).
“Due to the onslaught of breaches we are seeing every day, which stretch to the highest levels of the U.S. government, it’s hardly surprising that a majority of Americans believe that a presidential campaign will fall victim to hacking,” said V. Miller Newton, CEO and president of PKWARE. “Behind every candidate there are legions of operatives, allies and adversaries sharing sensitive information. Whether foreign entities or campaign operatives and lone wolves based in the U.S., presidential campaigns offer unique staging grounds for what could be highly disruptive attacks.”
Although Hillary Clinton has faced an email controversy, most survey respondents (42 percent) said they felt she was the best candidate to address cyber issues. She is followed by Donald Trump (24 percent), Scott Walker (18 percent) and Jeb Bush (15 percent). Clinton also rated highest among millennial respondents.
International Objectives
The PKWARE survey revealed that 51 percent of U.S. voters feel that China has “the best hackers”, followed the United States (30 percent), Russia (13 percent) and North Korea (7 percent). Pres. Obama fielded a question on Chinese relations on cybersecurity, an issue expected to come up for those racing to become his successor.
“We have repeatedly said to the Chinese government that we understand traditional intelligence-gathering functions that all states, including us, engage in,” Obama responded during his speech. “And we will do everything we can to stop you from getting state secrets or transcripts of a meeting that I’ve had, but we understand you’re going to be trying to do that. That is fundamentally different from your government or its proxies engaging directly in industrial espionage and stealing trade secrets, stealing proprietary information from companies. That we consider an act of aggression that has to stop.”
Obama has upcoming meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and allegations that Chinese hackers have been behind attacks on U.S. government data are expected to be a key part of the talks. He noted that the U.S. does not “want to see the Internet weaponized.”
“With respect to China, this will probably be one of the biggest topics that I discuss with President Xi,” Obama said. “And we are preparing a number of measures that will indicate to the Chinese that this is not just a matter of us being mildly upset, but is something that will put significant strains on the bilateral relationship if not resolved, and that we are prepared to some countervailing actions in order to get their attention. My hope is, is that it gets resolved short of that, and ultimately the goal should be to have some basic international framework that won’t be perfect because there’s still going to be a lot of non-state actors and hackers who are very good, and we’re still going to have to have good defense and still have to be able to find the fingerprints of those and apprehend them, and stop networks that are engaged in cybercrime.”
