American Companies Are Not Adequately Protected From Cyber Threats

The Center for Internet Security's CEO Jane Holl Lute said that while companies across the United States are spending a lot of money to thwart cyber-attacks, they're not doing the fundamentals of what she calls 'cyber-hygiene.' Holl Lute said that even the biggest companies aren't 100 percent sure who is on their networks, what those individuals are trying to run on the company's systems and who has administrative permissions. Holl Lute, who was previously the CEO of the Council on CyberSecurity, said many companies also do not have an automated system to detect and prevent and cue those in the company's technology department when there is a security breach. The big question is of course, if large corporations aren't fulfilling the basics, what are they spending big money on? Well, Holl Lute said many are 'buying high-end expertise to develop an individual understanding of the threat they are facing. And, that may be necessary, but what’s really true is that we’re all on the same Internet. We’re all facing a large degree of the same problems.' Home Depot (HD) and Target (TGT) are the latest retailers to suffer from cyber-hack's but Holl Lute says retailers are not the only industry sector that's vulnerable. 'I don’t think that there is an enterprise in the marketplace that delivers value without relying on its information technology and access to the internet. There’s not a single enterprise that hasn’t already been subject to significant attack.'