Digitized aircraft operating and maintenance data is great for efficiency, but all those Terabits expand the target for cyber attackers. Thales’s Data Security Summit in Washington on May 31 provided some guidance on how managers can counter the cyber threats:

1. Know your data, stressed Nick Jovanovic, vice president of Thales eSecurity Federal. The first step is discovery to learn all the data generated and stored by your firm, where it is, who ‘owns’ it, how valuable it is and where and how often it is backed up. You need all this to set your data-protection priorities.
2. Know the threats. Amateur hackers are less dangerous than professionals. These can be criminal hackers who want to steal or extort money by hacking into your data. Or they can be terrorists who want to do damage, but may also want to steal or extort to finance other terrorism.
3. Go on Offense. The best defenses must be complemented by a good offense. Artificial Intelligence tools can detect probes of data before a successful cyberattack.
4. Look For Vulnerabilities. The top IT giants pay staff bonuses to discover ways in which data can be hacked. You can afford to incentivize some clever people in your IT department to think like hackers every once in a while. 
5. Perimeter Defense Is Not Enough. Fifteen years ago, firewalls and other fences may have been enough. No longer. “Firewalls are Swiss Cheese now,” Jovanovic observes. Important data must be protected by layers of security, and the final layer should be data-centric encryption.