As Congress Debates CISPA, Companies Admit No Real Damage From Cyberattacks

from the the-truth-is-so-inconvenient dept

The 27 largest U.S. companies reporting cyber attacks say they sustained no major financial losses, exposing a disconnect with federal officials who say billions of dollars in corporate secrets are being stolen.



MetLife Inc., Coca-Cola Co. (KO), and Honeywell International Inc. were among the 100 largest U.S. companies by revenue to disclose online attacks in recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Citigroup Inc. (C) reported “limited losses” while the others said there was no material impact.

Since the beginning of the cybersecurity FUDgasm from Congress, we've been asking for proof of the actual problem. All we get are stories about how airplanes might fall from the sky, but not a single, actual example of any serious problem. Recently, some of the rhetoric shifted to how it wasn't necessarily planes falling from the sky but Chinese hackers eating away at our livelihoods by hacking into computers to get our secrets and destroy our economy. Today, Congress is debating CISPA (in secret) based on this assumption. There's just one problem: it's still not true.The 27 largest companies have now admitted to the SEC that cyberattacks are basically meaningless and have done little to no damage.So what's this all really about? It goes back to what we said from the very, very beginning. This is all FUD, engineered by defense contractors looking for a new way to charge the government tons of money, combined with a willing government who sees this as an opportunity to further take away the public's privacy by claiming that it needs to see into corporate networks to prevent these attacks.If this was a real problem, wouldn't we see at least some evidence?

Filed Under: cispa, companies, cybersecurity, harm, threats