What kind of attack should corporations be most worried about today?
Clarke: The biggest trend is attacks that steal information of one kind or another, whether that’s ID theft, theft of proprietary data or international espionage. Most of it is ID theft, that’s really where the illegal activity has moved. [Computer crime] has moved from being a joy ride to a financial crime. You first predicted a digital Pearl Harbor in 2000. Why haven’t there been any big cyber attacks? Or do we just not hear about them? We have attacks every day. The latest estimate on the cost of ID theft in the U.S. alone was about 50 billion, most of that due to attacks through cyberspace into databases. But what hackers don’t do typically is crash systems and turn things off because they find the Internet useful. That’s where they get their information, their money. How many of those breaches were actually exploited for financial crimes? In some ways it doesn’t matter if the information is exploited. The impacted companies are obligated by laws in 34 states to tell customers, so
