Collaborate Disseminate
Many former Cyber Command and NSA officials say the military’s rotation system and approach to retirement robs the military of cyber talent.
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The Department of Defense has sent personnel abroad to hunt for malicious software that adversaries may be using against U.S. voting infrastructure or networks prior to Election Day. Gen. Paul Nakasone announced Tuesday in a Foreign Affairs editorial that Cyber Command personnel would be deployed as part of a plan to allow defensive cyber-operators from the Pentagon to identify malware targeting other countries’ networks and systems. Similar attacks could later be used for attempted intrusions aimed at disrupting American technologies. The announcement coincides with ongoing efforts between Cyber Command, the military’s offensive hacking outfit, and the National Security Agency to monitor threats to the 2020 U.S. presidential election from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. It was not immediately clear where the military personnel were deployed. Cyber Command has run multiple so-called Hunt Forward missions in Montenegro, which, Russian military hackers have aimed to disrupt their political process, as they did with a hack-and-leak operation against the Democratic National Committee […]
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Gen. Paul Nakasone, the director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, is a busy man. He oversees vast, technical surveillance efforts in the U.S. and abroad, while also commanding a military outfit charged with launching cyberattacks. Emailing random women from an outpost in Syria is probably not on his to-do list. So when, Susan, a woman from the New York City area, started receiving correspondence from a “Paul Nakasone” this week, she wondered why the self-proclaimed “head of U.S. Army Cyber Command” was trying to flirt with her. “I Googled this guy and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Susan, who asked to be identified by only her first name, told CyberScoop. “And it was very flirtatious, but I’m a married woman.” Susan ultimately realized, that, no, she was not talking to the real Paul Nakasone. She and her friend were actually dealing with scammers who were posing as top […]
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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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The National Security Agency’s director issued a rebuke Wednesday of the Chinese government’s recent efforts to spread disinformation online about protests in Hong Kong focused on a controversial Chinese law. “The Chinese government has subverted pro-Democratic demonstrators with fake social media posts, providing us a snapshot of how Beijing weaponizes information,” Gen. Paul Nakasone said while delivering remarks at FireEye’s Cyber Defense Summit in Washington, D.C. As Hong Kong protesters have taken to the streets in recent months to protest proposals on Hong Kong’s extradition laws, China’s government has waged an information campaign on social media platforms to try shaping the narrative in favor of the police. In one instance, Beijing’s state press arm bought ads on Twitter critical of the protests. Twitter then said there was “reliable evidence” that the Chinese government was behind nearly 1,000 Twitter accounts trying to insert political discord about the protests. That same month, […]
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A key component of the Pentagon’s effort to defend the 2018 midterm elections from foreign interference was its collaboration with the Department of Justice to disrupt operations from overseas, Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, said Thursday. It’s the kind of interagency effort American officials are trying to achieve again before the 2020 presidential election. The NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, a unified combatant command at the Pentagon dedicated to running cyber-operations, worked with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in 2018 as part of an effort to avoid the kind of Russian meddling that occurred in 2016, Nakasone said. The effort to protect the 2018 midterm elections, collectively known as Synthetic Theology, resulted in disrupting the internet access of Russia’s social media troll farm, the Internet Research Agency. The effort represented the first cyber-operations abroad to protect U.S. elections, and it’s helping inform the intelligence community’s approach to […]
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The National Security Agency has started to lay the groundwork and select the leadership for its new Cybersecurity Directorate, which will be focused on fusing together signals intelligence with the agency’s cybersecurity protection mission, CyberScoop has learned. Neal Ziring, who most recently served as the NSA’s technical director for capabilities, will be the Cybersecurity Directorate’s technical director, an NSA spokesperson tells CyberScoop. Dave Frederick, the NSA’s chief of strategic counter cyber operations, will be the new deputy director, an NSA spokesperson said. In his most recent role, Ziring was responsible for acting as a liaison to both private industry and other government agencies. Ziring previously served as the technical director of the agency’s defensive operations directorate, the Information Assurance Directorate (IAD). Frederick was responsible for coordinating defensive and offensive cyber missions. NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone announced the new Cybersecurity Directorate earlier this week. It will be run by Anne […]
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Well, that was weird. When Gen. Paul Nakasone appeared Tuesday at the International Conference on Cybersecurity at Fordham University, he probably expected to hear questions about the new reorganization at the National Security Agency, or about the U.S. government’s ability to safeguard what’s expected to be one of the most contentious elections in recent memory amid historic levels of foreign meddling. It was not to be. Nakasone spent roughly an hour politely engaging Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist and author of a 2015 book on cybersecurity, in a bizarre conversation that alternated between Koppel questioning the decorated NSA director about the agency’s basic responsibilities, and whether Nakasone struggled with fake news from “tens of thousands” of “self-appointed journalists.” The “fireside chat” was perhaps the most widely anticipated presentation scheduled at ICCS, a regular gathering of some of the most powerful officials from the U.S. intelligence community. Koppel set the tone for […]
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The National Security Agency is creating a cybersecurity directorate to better protect the country against cyberthreats from foreign adversaries, an NSA spokesperson told CyberScoop. Anne Neuberger will be the intelligence agency’s first director for cybersecurity, a decision NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone is expected to make public Tuesday in New York City at the International Conference on Cyber Security. The directorate is slated to be operational Oct. 1 of this year, the spokesperson said. The move is intended to allow the NSA — which is part of the U.S. military — to better provide information gleaned from signals intelligence to agencies and the private sector in order to protect national critical infrastructure, an NSA spokesperson said. “It’s a major organization that unifies our foreign intelligence and our cyberdefense mission, and it’s charged with preventing and eradicating threats to national security systems and the defense industrial base,” the official told CyberScoop. Civilian agencies — such as the Department of […]
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As the U.S. National Security Agency incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence into its defensive cyber operations, officials are weighing whether cyber operators will have confidence in the algorithms underpinning those emerging technologies. NSA operators want to say, “is my AI or ML system explainable?” Neal Ziring, NSA’s Technical Director for Capabilities, told CyberScoop Thursday. “Contexts where the AI is recommending an action is where that will be most important.” The intelligence agency still is exploring how machine learning, an automated method of data analysis, might be used to detect threats and protect new Internet of Things technology. Given the amount of information that agency employees need to sort through, machine learning could help prioritize tasks and decrease the amount of time employees spend on triage. The NSA aims to use machine learning and artificial intelligence, in which computers make their own decisions, to more efficiently stop threats, and eventually leverage those tools in offensive operations. But, if NSA workers don’t trust the […]
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