Podcast: Annie Fixler on Cyber Warfare in the 21st Century

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 16 December 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

According to a new report, in 2020 2,400 U.S.-based healthcare facilities, local governments, schools, and other institutions were victims of ransomware—a form of cyber-attack in which a hacker holds a person’s data hostage and demands a ransom to permit them to access it again. Ransomware has become such a problem that in October the U.S. State Department formed a new office to confront it, and in November the Treasury Department announced that it will partner with its Israeli counterpart on a joint task force to address this and other cybersecurity issues.

Israel, like America, is also confronted with problems in cyberspace. On this week’s podcast, Annie Fixler, the deputy director of the Center on Cyber Technology and Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, joins Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver to explain the threats that cyber warfare poses to American life, and the role that Israel could play in helping secure both countries from malicious attacks, whether they come from lone-wolf hackers or enemy nation-states.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the spring of 2021, the Institute for Security and Technology published a report,
0:13.2	detailing how thousands of businesses, hospitals, school districts, city governments,
0:18.5	and other institutions in the United States and around the
0:21.5	world were paralyzed as their digital networks were held hostage by malicious actors seeking payouts.
0:29.1	That is a form of cyber attack known as ransomware because the hacker holds your data hostage
0:34.5	and demands a fee to allow you to access it again. In 2020, the report
0:39.3	noted, 2,400 U.S.-based governments, healthcare facilities, and schools were victims of ransomware.
0:46.3	In October of this year, the State Department announced the formation of a new cyber office
0:52.3	to deal with this kind of cybersecurity, seeing it as a critical
0:55.8	national security threat. Then in November, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it will
1:01.3	partner with Israeli counterparts to launch a joint task force to address cybersecurity. Israel
1:07.6	is on the front lines of the battles taking place in cyberspace, suffering not only cyber
1:13.1	attacks itself, but also, according to publicly available reporting, deploying offensive
1:18.9	cyber capabilities to strengthen its conventional defensive architecture.
1:24.0	Dimensioning this threat to the United States and assessing the role that an American partnership
1:28.7	with Israel could play in securing American entities is the subject of our discussion this week.
1:34.8	Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest is Annie Fixler,
1:40.7	Deputy Director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy's Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.
1:47.2	If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher,
1:52.6	Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas.
1:58.4	I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes
2:01.6	at podcast at tikfafund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work at
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