In an article published by Forbes, Andy Purdy – Forbes Councils Member and CSO for Huawei Technologies USA – discusses the linkages between public health and cybersecurity. The article features the work being done by CyberGreen to establish a science of cyber public health.

The CyberGreen Institute, a nonprofit organization, has effectively pioneered a new model for cybersecurity: the “internet public health model.” It assesses internet health by looking at risk factors such as unmaintained nodes in the network. These vulnerable nodes can be compromised and then leveraged for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. CyberGreen scans unmaintained nodes to detect vulnerabilities that could create opportunities for cyber miscreants.

These ongoing scans reveal various risk factors shown in the CyberGreen Statistics platform. It’s a kind of dashboard that serves as an indicator of the internet health of a country, a region or the planet.

This approach to risk illustrates the maxim that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Using easy-to-understand metrics, CyberGreen aims to give policymakers and other leaders a better understanding of cyber risks and areas for improvement. The information can also be extremely helpful to cybersecurity incident response teams (CSIRTs) in government or the private sector, as well as organizations working on cybersecurity capability building and development.

CyberGreen believes (as I do) that security is a shared responsibility. Yurie Ito, CyberGreen’s Founder and Executive Director, has said that securing cyber systems is not just up to cybersecurity practitioners. It’s also the responsibility of telecom and network operators, IT service providers, equipment and software vendors and others. Only by working collaboratively can the private and public sectors effectively address the increasingly complex challenges of cybersecurity and the growing sophistication of malicious cyber actors.

The full article can be found here.