John McAfee John McAfee John McAfee is running for US president as a member of the Libertarian Party. This is an op-ed he wrote and gave us permission to run.

My first job out of graduate school was with General Electric’s Process Automation Division in Salem, Virginia. It was there that I learned process control programming. My first assignment was automating Australia Iron and Steel’s rolling plant in Port Kembla, New South Wales. GE was the only company in the world at the time that manufactured process automation computers.

A steel mill rolling plant takes white hot steel plates, and through a succession of pressure rolls, compresses the steel into the thin sheets that are used in automobile body construction and similar purposes.

Rolling plants had previously been controlled by talented human labor, but when human mistakes were made, entire sets of pressure rollers could be destroyed by assigning inappropriate pressures, and a steel mill could be shut down for days or weeks while the processing line was repaired. Automation was the answer to human error.

But even then, in 1969, we understood the implications to a steel mill’s future if the software used in the control computers was compromised. Instead of a single individual’s potential for inadvertently damaging a sub-section of the plant, the control computers would be capable of destroying every element of the processing line - potentially putting the mill permanently out of business.

This is when I first understood the fact that the more our society becomes computerized, the more vulnerable we all become to compromised software.

When I worked at GE, the word “cybersecurity” had not yet been coined. It was before universities offered computer science courses and published material was non-existent. It was during the time when all serious computer science professionals received their training directly from the companies that manufactured computers, and security was on the minds of a mere handful of people.

I was one of those people.

General Electric Wikimedia Commons

My second job was with Univac - a major mainframe computer manufacturer. I was an operating systems programmer, and it was here that I first implemented a system to protect software from outside access. I was addressing the problem of keeping our operating system design secrets and our operating systems code from our largest competitor - IBM.

This was just prior to the explosion of mainframe computers onto the world stage. Corporate espionage was at its highest point.

It was not until my next job, at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, that a codified method of cybersecurity was implemented. I was assigned to a data reduction team analyzing the mountain of data that had been returned from TIROS - our first orbiting weather satellite.

Our government believed the data included images that were crucial to our national security and for the first time I introduced a sophisticated form of encryption and physical safeguards of data. I fell in love with digital security and have never abandoned it as my life’s passion. It found its greatest expression, perhaps, in my founding of the McAfee Antivirus Company - the world’s first public digital security company.

Cybersecurity has evolved dramatically since I founded McAfee.

In the mid 1980’s, cybersecurity was all about protecting data from either theft, manipulative modification, or destruction. Keeping personnel records, financial information, industrial secrets and similar data safe from competitors, foreign governments and malicious individuals was the prime focus. It was a simple time with simple problems.

In the intervening years, the cybersecurity landscape has evolved into a complex interconnected web of data, devices and automated control systems. My first job, at General Electric, working on process control systems, forebode a world in which cybersecurity must encompass everything from our televisions and automobiles to our military hardware.

Few people are aware of the cybersecurity risks that surround them full time.

If you own a new Samsung TV, it's likely constantly recording every word that is spoken in its vicinity, and these recordings are being sent to unnamed third parties.

If you own a car newer than two years old, chances are that hackers have already figured out how to take full control of it while you are driving down the highway. Last year, a brand new Jeep was hacked into by hackers hundreds of miles away and the Jeep was forced off the road by the hackers.

If you fly on an airplane that provides Internet access, hackers anywhere in the world can take control of the plane and alter it's course and speed, and perhaps even bring it down.

Participants use laptops on the first day of the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) - Behind Enemy Lines computer hacker conference on December 27, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. Adam Berry/Getty Images

Medical devices such as pacemakers, medical monitors, and other care-critical devices can be hacked into and patients placed into life-threatening situations.

Our mobile devices are ubiquitously used as spy devices by everyone from our NSA to bored hackers in Uzbekistan.

These and hundreds of other cybersecurity risks surround all of us wherever we go, whatever we do.

In addition to our personal security, our national security is no less plagued.

Foreign States provide the greatest risk to our national cybersecurity. In the past few years numerous hacks directly affecting our military hardware, including aircraft, missile defense systems and military communications systems have been attributed to the Chinese and other foreign states.

But it is not just foreign states that have the capability to disable our weapons systems or turn our weapons against us. Individual hackers are now capable of taking control of our military drones and other military weapons, or even local and state police surveillance drones. Now, instruction manuals exist for anyone wishing to hijack one of our military attack drones, or even a stealth bomber.

So who can be called a cybersecurity expert in this vast landscape of thorny risks and deadly missteps?

U.S. President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in Arlington, Virginia. Kristoffer Tripplaar-Pool/Getty Images

It's someone who understands, first and foremost, the interconnected, multi-dimensional web of interactions between our pure data systems and our automated control systems, because there is no way to secure a single component of this web without securing those elements with which the component interfaces.

We can secure, for example, the software within our military drones so that hackers cannot directly hack into them, but if we do not likewise secure the communications systems and headquarters control systems that give orders to the drones from halfway around the world, then the secure software within the drones is meaningless.

A cybersecurity expert must likewise understand, at the deepest level, how hardware and software mesh together. A person who cannot understand how machine language controls the fundamental processing and the operation of peripheral devices will be helpless against hackers who utilize hardware and firmware anomalies to gain access and take control of software systems.

A cybersecurity expert must also have a deep understanding of communications systems and the various protocols upon which they are built. Hacking, first and foremost, uses communications systems as a main component of entry into a target environment.

A cybersecurity expert must have a firm knowledge of existing hacking toolkits, and must be able to anticipate the evolution of these toolkits into increasingly sophisticated weaponized software.

In short, a cybersecurity expert must know every aspect of cyberscience. In addition, he or she must be a full-time student of human nature, for it is social engineering which is emerging as the philosopher’s stone of new-age hacking.