Category Archives: Cyber Moonshot

Latest ‘cyber moonshot’ idea is a national DDoS defense system

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Phil Quade, formerly the NSA’s top cyber official and White House liaison, calls himself “an Apollo guy” — a big fan of the huge Saturn V rockets which took Americans to the moon in the 1960s. So he rears back when people use the term “moonshot” to lend credibility to a vague idea like “making the internet safe.” “You have to define it,” he says, echoing other critics who’ve suggested that the term “cyber moonshot” lacks the clarity and simplicity of the original lunar mission — to get a man to the moon and bring him back safely. But Quade’s own moonshot — one of a couple of ideas he and other White House staff developed in the waning days of the Obama administration — is very clear and simple, he says: To build a national capacity to counter distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. “You need to get the carriers, the solution providers and […]

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Bossert doubtful on ‘cyber moonshot,’ preferring to focus on risk management

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The problem with thinking about confronting the nation’s cybersecurity challenge in terms of a “cyber moonshot” is that it implies an end-state where the goal has been reached, White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert said Tuesday. “The call to go to the moon had a clearly measurable end point,” just as do other analogies — for example eradicating a disease — he told reporters Tuesday on the sidelines of the Palo Alto Networks’ Ignite federal cyber conference. “In the cyber space, I think it’s going to be a more appropriate analogy to employ a risk-management set of terminology, the idea being that you will always have to manage that risk and mitigate it.” Cyberthreats wouldn’t end, Bossert pointed out, even if there was a game-changing national achievement such as that posited by the moonshot’s supporters.  The concept has been used with increasing frequency recently to describe a proposal for a huge national effort to […]

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Rep. Ratcliffe pushes to define ‘cyber moonshot’ goals

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The United States needs to carefully define the goal of a “cyber moonshot” before embarking on a national mission to make the internet safe, Rep. John Ratcliffe said Tuesday. The original moonshot “wasn’t easy to do, but it was easy to define,” he said at an event hosted Tuesday by Palo Alto Networks. “Before we work towards our own cyber moonshot, we need to define the objectives of that moonshot with great precision and clarity.” Ratcliffe, R-Texas, is chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, and the author of several cybersecurity bills. The cyber moonshot is an analogy that has been used with increasing frequency to describe a proposal for a huge national effort to secure the digitally connected world. At a meeting earlier this month at a federal telecommunications advisory panel, a number of leading government scientists debated its usefulness. “I don’t mean to […]

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What is a ‘cyber moonshot,’ anyway?

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Boosters say it would provide a unifying national goal on a key national security issue. Critics argue that using a space-travel analogy is all wrong. Like it or not, the “cyber moonshot” is becoming a thing. Earlier this month, a presidential advisory committee debated the concept, and on Wednesday, former CIA CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt used a keynote at CyberTalks to call for one. Such a project would create a single national goal for a much-needed cybersecurity game-changer. But framing the problem in terms of a huge singular goal pursued by a lone government agency isn’t necessarily helpful, argue critics. And even supporters don’t seem sure how the characteristics of the moonshot map to the much diverse cybersecurity problem set. “The cyber moonshot is a call to action,” said Hunt, now the federal cybersecurity practice lead for Accenture. It involved setting “a big, hairy audacious goal … shifting the balance of cyber-power [toward defenders […]

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