TEL AVIV – Israel and the U.S. will sign an agreement for the “real time” exchange of information relating to cyber security threats, Alejandro Mayorkas, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said on Monday.
“One of the lessons we learned is to go it alone is precarious; working together makes us stronger,” Mayorkas said at a cybersecurity conference at Tel Aviv University. “The cybersecurity threat is borderless. Information must be shared.”
He added that the U.S. and Israel are world leaders in cybersecurity and it is up to them to combat the increasing threats by sharing information and R & D.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben-Israel, the university’s cyber department head, quipped that while bank robbers must work hard to rob a second one after robbing one bank, cyber hackers “can snap their fingers and replicate” their attacks elsewhere. The best way of preventing this is if countries share information fast enough.
He added that Israel is working on new technologies that will be able to handle much larger data sets in order to defend against threats.
Eviatar Matania, the head of Israel’s National Cyber Bureau, said the automatic sharing between the two countries would be set up in a matter of months. He also hopes to sign similar agreements with other countries around the world.
“We believe in sharing information between companies, sectors and countries because the threat is so global,” Matania said. “If we share information we can prevent it from propagating.”
MarketsandMarkets, a Dallas, Texas-based market research firm estimates that the global cybersecurity market will be worth more than $170 billion by 2020. Security solutions are needed for the dramatic rise in threats, much of which MarketsandMarkets attributes to the explosion of social media and mobile usage.
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