Larry Magid: White House Developing Anti-Hacker Standards
SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS)— The White House has developed standards it hopes will help key industries protect themselves from hackers.
Administration officials also are launching a voluntary program to encourage businesses to put the standards into use. This is follow up to a document the White House released a year ago where they did some preliminary standards.
It's really more of an advisory document that would provide businesses that are involved with either critical infrastructure, like utilities or handling large amounts of data, like retailers Neiman Marcus and Target stores, which recently revealed data exposure.
New Standards Against Hackers
The guidelines would identify, protect, detect, respond and recover any kind of security breach. It's really encouraging to get a plan in place so you're not just blindsided by an issue, similar to a disaster relief plan in case of an earthquake.
This plan would go down well with businesses, but there are certainly some privacy advocates that worry about it and their concern is whether or not information sharing is part of this strategy.
Another important question is about the regulation of these standards. If you think about it, the health department doesn't have an advisory for restaurants, they have strict rules that the businesses must abide by or else they get shut down.
