Richard Behar

How Corporate and Government Cybersecurity Is Failing—and What You Must Do About It

Richard Behar speaks about what businesses and governments are doing (and not doing) to secure computers, which is essential to national security given that we all are now interconnected.

He wrote a definitive story for Forbes magazine (May 2016) about a clandestine cybersecurity military squad in Israel called “Unit 8200.” Behar explains why the unit is “probably the best school in the world for entrepreneurship.” He also wrote a cover story for Forbes about under-the-radar ventures in high-tech between Israelis and Palestinians.

Behar’s expertise in cybersecurity dates to 1997, when he was ahead of the curve on the subject of email security—with a cover story in Fortune magazine called Who’s Reading Your Email. For this award-winning exposé, which was used in college computer classrooms, Behar enlisted top-flight former Air Force computer security experts to hack a Fortune 500 company—with the firm’s permission—to show how easy it was to do. He also spent days with one of the country’s most notorious computer hackers for a profile, soon after the hacker’s home was raided by Secret Service. 

Just after 9-11, Behar exposed a radical Arab website based in Texas, which had links to the Hamas terrorist group, that was raided by federal agents five days before the 9-11 attack. He then flew to Pakistan, where he reported two award-winning pieces (for Fortune and CNN), one of which studied the movement of money by radical groups throughout the banking world. Recently, Behar was invited by the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel for a private tour of that country’s “Cyber City,” a collection of buildings rising up from a desert city that may become the world’s #1 hub for cybersecurity—both for businesses and governments. He has also been gathering data on how social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube are facilitating global jihad.

China at Home and in Africa: The West’s Moral and Economic Default

State Department cables expose the nature of China’s economic march throughout Africa. One document quotes the U.S. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs—in rare candor—describing China as “a very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals.” Behar’s award-winning exposes have long documented this uncomfortable truth—even as every American President since Nixon has embraced the same policy: Trade with China and time is on our side. But what if it’s not true? What if we are only helping cement the Communist Party’s grip on the nation? How can the West get out of this economic and ethical conundrum? China’s economy, at this stage of its development, is vastly corrupt in ways most Westerners can’t imagine. The country is the world’s largest counterfeiter of Western products—and its economy would be seriously impacted if the Party honestly cracked down on those “fakes.” Meanwhile, from Algeria to Zambia, from aluminum on up the resource ladder to zinc, Behar will discuss an economic model of exploitation and corruption that is at once formidably efficient and tragically flawed—and how China’s new “scramble for Africa” is interlocked with America’s economy to the detriment of the world’s poorest citizens. On a planet that’s being consumed by those who live on its surface, behind that Made-in-China tag at Wal-Mart and inside our iPods is a parasitical and mutually-reinforcing death spiral. With China now the world’s second-largest economy (and gaining fast on the U.S.), we all need to ask if this matrix is now set in stone.