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MIT Cybersecurity Expert Stresses Importance of Collaboration

There always will be weak links in cybersecurity, but finding out about threats and responding quickly are key.

(TNS) -- Don't look for the government, market forces, vendors or law enforcement to provide the cybersecurity against malicious hackers and others posing threats, Daniel Weitzner told a Memphis audience tasked with protecting information technology.

Weitzner, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Policy Research Initiative, on Monday said that IT and information management leaders should look to themselves their peers and collaborate, like those who pioneered the development of the internet and the World Wide Web.

"First and foremost, the best security teams are the ones that connected with their peers, either locally, or in their industry sector," Weitzner said.

From 2010 to 2012, Weitzner served as United States deputy chief technology officer for internet policy in the White House, helping guide the nation's policy on issues including online privacy and cybersecurity.

He tailored his talk at the University of Memphis FedEx Institute of Technology to his audience, a leadership luncheon hosted by the Greater Memphis IT Council and the Society of Information Management.

During his half-hour speech and questions that followed, Weitzner said:

There always will be weak links in cybersecurity, such as workers who click on a malicious e-mail link, and the risks will shift as workers get smarter. Finding out about threats and responding quickly are key.

Self-driving vehicles, drones and machine-learning neural net systems that can make a medical diagnosis are examples of autonomous systems that make decisions will be a challenge."The challenge we're going to have is they're never going to be perfect, obviously" he said. While able to deal with a fair amount of imperfection in humans, acceptance and accountability for machines poses a challenge, he said.

The Federal Trade Commission has emerged as a federal watchdog that can bite companies that don't practice reasonable cybersecurity measures. Wyndham Hotels and Resorts settled a case in late 2015 with the FTC for "security practices that unfairly exposed the payment card information of hundreds of thousands of consumers to hackers in three separate data breaches," according to the FTC.In January, the FTC charged computer device maker D-Link with putting consumers' privacy at risk with computer routers and cameras.

Malicious hackers operating from overseas are like pirates and he sees private actions, as well as governments, targeting wrongdoers.

©2017 The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.