Bruce McConnell, who just stepped down as one of the federal government's top cybersecurity policymakers, says he understands why some lawmakers don't trust DHS with significant authority to safeguard government IT.

The old saw of a blind squirrel fortuitously finding an acorn reminds the Atlantic Council's Jason Healey of cyber-assailants from third-rate cyber-power Iran, believed to be behind DDoS attacks on U.S. banks.

It's time to start thinking about the next wave of DDoS attacks, says Neustar's Rodney Joffe. And it's time for other critical infrastructure industries - not just banks - to assess their risks.

Organizations won't effectively share cyberthreat intelligence until they have more efficient ways of gathering and prioritizing data, says EMC's Kathleen Moriarty, author of a new report about information sharing weaknesses.

Though others deemed Bruce McConnell as one of the government's most innovative security thought-leaders, he says his vision of how best to secure IT evolved during his just-ended 4-year tenure at DHS as a senior cybersecurity policymaker.

Because mobile payments are so new, banking institutions worldwide are still trying to understand which threats to address first, says payments fraud expert Neira Jones.

The best ideas to secure the Internet do not come from the top-down government approach imposed by some foreign governments, but from the openness derived by a multi-stakeholder process, says Christopher Painter, America's top cyber diplomat.

The hotline, the communications link established between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War to avert a nuclear war, is being used to warn of potential cyber and environmental crises, the State Department's Christopher Painter says.

Kim Peretti, the ex-prosecutor who helped nab Heartland hacker Albert Gonzalez, says recent indictments offer insights into the actors behind global fraud schemes that affected 160 million cardholders.