“The former cybersecurity director at DHS had some sobering words last week about the battle for cybersecurity. ‘We lost,’ the former director, now chief executive officer of NetWitness Corp., said at the Symantec Government Symposium in Washington. ‘We lost the cyber war over the last 15 years. Our computing environment is already compromised,’ and things are likely to get worse going forward because we do not really understand security. ‘We lack any meaningful metrics or measures to say how secure a system is.’ It no longer is true that the best minds are on the side of the hackers. The dark side of cyberspace has been co-opted by organized crime, entrepreneurs of questionable integrity and, possibly, terrorists. Much of the process of illegal hacking has been mechanized to the point that it involves automation, not innovation. Part of the problem was identified by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team director. ‘We lack a common language for discussing many of the elements of security. We need to reinvent not only how we do incident response, but how we talk about events,’ the director said at the symposium.”