White House Cybersecurity Summit: A missed opportunity

On Wednesday, Aug. 25, President Biden met with CEOs of some of the nation’s largest companies in various industries to discuss cybersecurity and key calls to action. These companies included Apple, Google, and JPMorgan Chase. Biden said in his remarks before the summit, “The reality is most of our critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, and the federal government can’t meet this challenge alone. You have the power, capacity, and responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity. Ultimately, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

I find the summit’s topic and those in attendance to be interesting. How can we talk about securing our critical infrastructure but have no critical infrastructure representation at the summit? That seems odd to me. I’ve spent the last 26 years of my life in industrial control systems, mainly in the heavy processing industries. In all those years, I don’t remember seeing any Apple products used in any control systems or actually controlling any critical infrastructure. So Apple, with little to no footprint in the space, is going to be the company that solves our industrial control system cybersecurity problem? Maybe, but it needs help, and that help wasn’t represented in the summit.

The thought process could be that the people dealing with the problems today will not be the people getting you out of them. If that is what’s going on, I can understand getting outside viewpoints and perspective, but that doesn’t mean excluding the people who are dealing with the problems day in and day out. These are the people who understand the infrastructure and the potential pitfalls, the people who understand the differences between IT and OT, the people whose livelihoods depend on these systems running and who are ultimately accountable for these systems. To have zero representation at the summit seems like a missed opportunity.

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