In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with cybersecurity expert and cyber safety advocate, Josh Corman. Josh is the founder of I am The Cavalry,an advocacy group actively engaged in addressing some of the most pressing issues of public safety and threats to human life on the Internet today. He is also the Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Josh Corman is part of the 2016 Cybersecurity Task Force commissioned by the United States Congress to address the growing risk to our hospitals, medical infrastructure, and connected devices, from cyber-attacks.

Gone are the quaint, innocent days of the early Internet, with its pesky Trojan’s, Macro Viruses, RATs, slammer worms, and blaster worms. Today’s cybersecurity landscape features a wide assortment of easily accessible and robust attack tools that exploit software bugs like Shellshock and Heartbleed. This is a cybersecurity landscape littered with DDoS and PDoS attacks like the Mirai Botnet and the recently released Brickerbot. The use of ransomware tools like CryptoLocker and SamSam have become billion-dollar criminal industries. Cybercrime is estimated to cost the global economy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars a year. Yet, we accept the losses as the simple cost of doing business. But what about when the cost of these crimes escalates from dollars and cents to flesh and blood? What are the risks to our industrial control systems? What about our aviation and emergency response infrastructure? What are the vulnerabilities in our connected devices, cars, and hospitals? The threats posed by cyber criminals, terrorists, and hackers are no longer fringe concerns. They strike at the heart of our increasingly interconnected, exposed, and vulnerable society. In this episode, we explore what to do about them.

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Join the conversation at @hiddenforcespod

Joshua Corman is the director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a founder of I am The Cavalry (dot org). Corman previously served as CTO for Sonatype, director of security intelligence for Akamai, and in senior research and strategy roles for The 451 Group and IBM Internet Security Systems. He co-founded @RuggedSoftware and @IamTheCavalry to encourage new security approaches in response to the world’s increasing dependence on digital infrastructure. Josh's unique approach to security in the context of human factors, adversary motivations, and social impact has helped position him as one of the most trusted names in security. He also serving as an adjunct faculty for Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College and on the 2016 HHS Cybersecurity Task Force.

@JoshCorman