Category Archives: Anne Neuberger

Michael Sulmeyer, who held cyber posts under Trump and Obama, gets Biden White House gig

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Michael Sulmeyer, a senior adviser to National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command leader Gen. Paul Nakasone, will take the position of senior director for cyber in the Biden White House. Sulmeyer’s selection came with no formal announcement. Instead, the transition website posted his position Monday evening. Sulmeyer is a cybersecurity veteran with broad experience, one of many to join the Biden administration. He’s also one of several whose tenures have included roles in the Trump administration. Beyond serving under Nakasone, he also served in the Obama administration at the Defense Department, where he was director for plans and operations for cyber policy. Between roles in the Trump and Obama administrations, he was director of the Belfer Center’s Cyber Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also wrote extensively for Lawfare on subjects like election security, federal cybersecurity strategy and DOD-related cybersecurity issues. In the past, the National Security […]

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Rob Joyce named new NSA cybersecurity director

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Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency’s special U.S. liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy in London, will replace Anne Neuberger as director in the agency’s Cybersecurity Directorate, the NSA announced Friday. The Biden transition team announced Wednesday that Neuberger will soon be joining the Biden administration as deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology on the National Security Council (NSC). It was not immediately clear who would take on Joyce’s role as the NSA’s senior cryptologic representative in the U.K. Joyce has a long track record of working in cybersecurity leadership roles in the U.S. government. He previously served as senior advisor for cybersecurity strategy to the NSA director, and before that served as special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator on the NSC at the White House. At the NSC Joyce was responsible for national and international cybersecurity strategy and policy for the government. His expertise in cyber-operations […]

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Biden team taps NSA Cybersecurity Director Anne Neuberger for NSC

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Anne Neuberger, the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity director, will be joining the Biden administration as deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, the Biden transition team announced Wednesday. Neuberger has been serving in her role as the director of the year-old Cybersecurity Directorate at the Pentagon’s foreign signals intelligence agency for just over a year, but she has a track record of leadership at the NSA. She has previously served as the lead on the NSA’s task force to counter Russian threats to U.S. elections, previously known as the “Russia Small Group,” as well as its chief risk officer. She has also overseen cyber-operations at the NSA during her time serving as assistant deputy director of the Operations Directorate. Neuberger’s selection could be a signal the Biden administration intends to prioritize cybersecurity issues at the NSC. The Biden transition team has already announced a whole slew of other […]

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Biden transition fills some top cybersecurity personnel spots

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The incoming Biden administration has spent the week heralding some of its cybersecurity-related personnel decisions, even as a couple key jobs remain a question mark. The Biden transition on Friday announced a slew of National Security Council picks. Among them is Caitlin Durkovich to serve as senior director for resilience and response, reflecting a similar role she once held at a Department of Homeland Security division that Congress later renamed and reorganized as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Andrea Kendall-Taylor will take the job of senior director for Russia and Central Asia, areas she worked on during a prior government stint in the intelligence community. “This outstanding team of dedicated public servants will be ready to hit the ground running on day one to address the transnational challenges facing the American people — from climate to cyber,” said Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “They reflect the very best of our […]

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The NSA is piloting a secure DNS service for the defense industrial base

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In an effort to better protect the U.S. defense industrial base from malware-based threats, the National Security Agency has launched a pilot program on securing Domain Name System use for U.S. defense contractors. The NSA’s cybersecurity directorate has been working on the the pilot, called secure DNS, for six weeks, the directorate’s chief, Anne Neuberger, said during a virtual event Thursday. “Our analysis highlighted that using secure DNS would reduce the ability for 92% of malware attacks … from a command and control perspective, deploying malware on a given network,” Neuberger said. DNS, is the protocol by which IP addresses are translated to access specific websites with their more familiar domain names and URLs. Attackers have long exploited DNS to deliver malware to targets or run credential-stealing campaigns, according to security researchers and the Department of Homeland Security. Since the NSA Cybersecurity Directorate was established last fall, shoring up the cybersecurity of […]

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Russian interference in 2016 election allowed for better information sharing, top DHS cyber official says

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There was a time when the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security primarily kept to themselves when it came to information sharing. That time is in the past. Two top government cybersecurity officials — Director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, and Anne Neuberger, the director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate — said Monday that information sharing and collaboration on cybersecurity issues has dramatically improved in recent years. “I really honestly think four-to-five years ago having a CISA … or NSA person sitting next to each other talking about how great things are — you would think you were in a really bizarre time,” Krebs said while speaking at San Francisco CyberTalks, an event produced by CyberScoop. “I don’t think we really had as close a partnership as it could have been.” Why has the relationship improved? Krebs said he attributes the bolstered collaboration between […]

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The NSA discovered a severe flaw in Microsoft Windows 10

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The National Security Agency recently uncovered a severe vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows operating system, helping the company issue patches and publicly raise awareness instead of using the flaw for its intelligence operations. The flaw, for which Microsoft issued a patch, makes Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 “fundamentally vulnerable,” according to a NSA advisory. Listed as CVE-2020-0601, the vulnerability occurs because Microsoft Windows CryptoAPI fails to properly validate certificates that use elliptic curve cryptography, which may allow an attacker to spoof the validity of certificate chains. “The certificate validation vulnerability allows an attacker to undermine how Windows verifies cryptographic trust and can enable remote code execution,” the NSA’s advisory reads. Anne Neuberger, the Director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate, said on a call Tuesday that the vulnerability caused great concern inside the Department of Defense because it’s fundamental to the trust of critical systems throughout the DOD and the U.S. government. “We […]

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Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday

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Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft Corp. is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows. Those sources say Microsoft has quietly shipped a patch for the bug to branches of the U.S. military and to other high-value customers/targets that manage key Internet infrastructure, and that those organizations have been asked to sign agreements preventing them from disclosing details of the flaw prior to Jan. 14, the first Patch Tuesday of 2020. Continue reading Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday→

NSA: ‘We know we need to do some work’ on declassifying threat intel

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One of the National Security Agency’s newly minted Cybersecurity Directorate’s goals is quickly share information on adversarial threats with the private sector — but the process for doing that needs to be refined, the directorate’s leader said Thursday. “The process in place today is where we know we need to do some work,”  Anne Neuberger said while speaking at CyberTalks, produced by CyberScoop. “When we find indications of a threat, we see planning to execute a particular operation, or we see the operation being executed. [But] because we learn about it in a classified way, we treat it as classified.” Part of the difficulty the NSA faces is adversaries often run operations and then discard their compromised infrastructure, making a protracted declassification process near useless since “indicators of compromise pretty much they have a ticking time clock for how useful they are,” Neuberger said. The new directorate, which started operations […]

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‘Kicking out the adversary’ is part of new Cybersecurity Directorate’s mission, NSA says

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The National Security Agency’s new Cybersecurity Directorate, charged with helping protect the defense industrial base and sensitive government computers by providing insights on foreign hackers, is now at initial operating capability, senior NSA officials informed reporters at a rare briefing Thursday at Fort Meade. Just this week the fledgling directorate took one of its first public actions, issuing an unclassified alert about nation-state hacking groups actively exploiting vulnerabilities on virtual private networks. Beyond the usual job of such alerts — identifying the bugs and recommending mitigations — the directorate made a point to provide ways for organizations to check whether they have been victimized, something the directorate intends to continue in unclassified ways moving forward. “We need to be sure that people who own networks that are vital to the national security systems and defense systems of this nation can figure out if adversaries have gained access into their networks,” NSA spokesperson Natalie Pittore said. “It’s about […]

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