The Cop on the Cyber Beat
Companies are hiring chief information-security officers and spending ever-increasing sums to protect their communications networks and databases from attack.
Bruce McConnell, a senior cybersecurity official with the Department of Homeland Security, sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s John Bussey to discuss what role the government should play in this effort and why he’s especially concerned about the theft of intellectual property.
Here are edited excerpts of their conversation.
MR. BUSSEY: We have a new era. It used to be that a company locked its front doors and maybe put a fence around the perimeter, kept its stuff in the warehouse, and there would be a cop on the beat making sure that anybody rattling the front door would be caught. Now that we have this new sort of rattling of the front door, who’s the cop on the beat?
