In 1799, a French soldier rediscovered an artifact in Egypt that has become the widely recognized symbol for translating ancient text into modern languages. To this day the Rosetta Stone is the most visited exhibit in The British Museum in London. It represents our inherent human need for accurate and timely information.

Today, people, organizations, devices and networks share information broadly, an incredible capability. However, threats to information -- shared or stored -- are also increasing at a tremendous rate. These threats, the underlying vulnerabilities and the inherent and all-too-often reported consequences, are a constant backdrop to our daily lives.

This is the "new normal" for cybersecurity, and for security more broadly. Government and industry collectively have much of the information about threats and the connections between them.

So what can be done? If information is shared responsibly, we can strengthen our defenses against these threats.

In the cyberspace security world, a myopic view of the threat environment is restricting. If data from cyberspace is gathered and interpreted (say, in the context of someone trying to steal credit card numbers), but the security frameworks neglect to tie this to a recent break-in into the server room (which resulted in someone uploading malware through a USB stick) or an attack on physical infrastructure, the cybersecurity community may never fully understand the tactics of the attackers, resolve past cases or prevent future attacks.


Efforts to all of this must span and integrate across the physical and cyber domains, an extension of responsible information-sharing over the decade-plus since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.

For this to work, the public and private sectors, domestically and internationally, must come together to develop and use authoritative open standards for sharing threat-related information and intelligence. These standards must address privacy and security concerns, capture common business context and translate concepts so they can be correlated. Doing so will empower those who participate, individually and collectively, to counter threats.

This approach to standardizing the way we share information is detailed in President Barack Obama's National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding. A broad and growing coalition, rooted in the ideas of open government and international voluntary consensus standards, is working to develop a modern—day cyber-threat Rosetta Stone.

Only when the cybersecurity community can shed a light on a particular threat from many angles will it be able to truly understand its implications and enable broad- based, efficient, effective and timely action.

Kshemendra Paul is program manager for the federal government's Information Sharing Environment, which works to improve the management, discovery and sharing of information about counterterrorism, homeland security and weapons of mass destruction. He wrote this for this newspaper.