Urmas Paet Quotes

As our use of technologies grows exponentially, so do our country's vulnerabilities. Our national security depends on the stability and reliability of our communications infrastructure. The cyber threat to IT and national security systems has never been greater.

If you don't treat [computer and Internet] security like a religious fanatic, you are going to be hurt like you can't imagine.

I am convinced that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be. And even they are converging into one category: companies that have been hacked and will be hacked again.

In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

It is a fairly open secret that almost all systems can be hacked, somehow. It is a less spoken of secret that such hacking has actually gone quite mainstream.

We face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, global cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas - things of incredible value to all of us. They seek to strike our critical infrastructure and to harm our economy.

Advances in technology - hugely beneficial though they are - render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.

We are vulnerable in the military and in our governments, but I think we're most vulnerable to cyber attacks commercially. This challenge is going to significantly increase. It's not going to go away.

Hacking is exploiting security controls either in a technical, physical or a human-based element.

There is no data base that is totally secure. The hackers are always one step ahead and have a vested interest in obtaining the data.

Cyberattacks diminish rather than accentuate political violence by making it easier for states, groups, and individuals to engage in two kinds of aggression that do not arise to the level of war: sabotage and espionage. Weaponized computer code and computer-based sabotage operations make it possible to carry out highly targeted attacks on adversary’s technical systems without directly and physically harming human operators and managers.

The next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack.

The very promise of safety [digital security] is iresistable temptation to hackers, the invading hordes of the 21st century.

One thing about cyberattacks is that what works on Monday may not work on Thursday.

When Russia's intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency's secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone.

There are two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those who don't know they have been hacked.

It shouldn't just be Russia we're concerned about, because many countries that are not our friends have been hacking into American accounts across the board.

We know that the government in China has been involved in cyber attacks before. I look at our partners around the world, our traditional allies, our NATO partners who are making the same assessment. We share so much with them and rely on their technology, their expertise and interoperability in many aspects of our own armed forces.

In the area of robotics and in the area of connectivity, technology is offering us things that we are vulnerable to - and we have to have a better response than a shrug.

Cyber terrorism could also become more attractive as the real and virtual worlds become more closely coupled, with automobiles, appliances, and other devices attached to the Internet.

'Social engineering,' the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology.

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many.

The biggest thing that concerns me is when we start getting countries using cybercrime to shut down infrastructure, electricity, communications systems, the Internet, et cetera.

There are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't.