The Corporate Cyberspace Menace You Don't Know

The business community may be both a backdoor and a front door to espionage activities that threaten U.S. national security. Hostile governments always have viewed companies that do business with their government as a possible conduit for valuable intelligence. But now that threat is extended to those companies' own activities in the global economy.

Much of the vital infrastructure is in the hands of the private sector, and national security experts have been working to reduce vulnerabilities there for years. What has changed now is that the commercial economic engine that powers the Free World is increasingly vulnerable to cyberspace marauders who are motivated more by profits than by ideology.

Dr. Joel F. Brenner, national counterintelligence executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, offers that just a decade or two ago, most people might have considered counterintelligence a problem for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency and the military. In that era, governments basically stole information from inside other governments.

But that trend has diminished over the years. In the West, as the relationship between the public and private sectors has grown, government increasingly has contracted for many activities that formerly were done by civil servants or a conscript military.

Today, many secrets that used to reside exclusively within government can be found throughout the economy in the hands of private contractors. Not only does the government outsource many traditional political-military functions that generate classified information, but a great deal of critical infrastructure information also is held by state and local governments and private companies. Commercial and non-governmental entities control a significant amount of the critical infrastructure.