Accuracy of Information and Public-Private Sector Cooperation

The lack of accurate information on e-security incidents is the result of the lack of incentives to capture the data, measure it, and inform users. E-security would improve worldwide through the creation of a set of national and cross-border incentive arrangements to encourage financial services providers to share accurate information on actual denial-of-service intrusions, thefts, hacks, and so on. Greater public-private sector cooperation is needed in this area. Critical to any global solution will be for a universally trusted third party to administer a global base of information relating to esecurity incidents. In this area, the role of multilateral agencies to facilitate cooperation deserves examination as well as the potential for use of self-regulatory organizations with very wide global ownership under a wholly separate technical management (such as Carnegie Mellon CERT) that might act to assure the absolute privacy and non-identification of parties contributing the information. Such arrangements and relevant non-disclosure provisions and potential liability for any third party that would store such information could be highly complex to organize but does merit investigation as well.