The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
The Center for Education and Research inInformation Assurance and Security (CERIAS)
In today’s digital age, we all have what’s called a digital footprint — information in the cyber world about who we are. It includes where we live, who our relatives are, where we work, what we earn, what we buy and it goes on and on.
“All that information is available and it’s out there permanently,” said Eugene Spafford, a computer sciences professor at Purdue University and executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. “Once it gets out, there’s really no way to call it back.”
Eugene Spafford, a computer-science professor at Purdue University and a member of the Naval Academy’s Cybersecurity Advisory Board, has been thinking about all the ways computers work (and fail) since 1979. “So many [technologies] are interconnected in ways we don’t see,” he says, “that a longer shutdown lasting weeks or months would be catastrophic.”
“This gets to the root of the issue,” said Purdue professor Gene Spafford, a cybersecurity expert who has also advised government agencies including the NSA, FBI and Air Force. “If the Chinese or the Iranian government under their legal system has all the legal requirements met to break the encryption or look at what is on a phone, they would have a same standing as the U.S. government does in this case to compel Apple to cooperate.”
Experts say investigations into cybercrime are complicated, and that police are probably making progress that isn’t readily apparent.
“So long as you don’t have someone very sophisticated doing it, they are likely to get caught,” said Professor Eugene H. Spafford, who studies cybersecurity at Purdue University.
