The National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate is focusing its resources on protecting medical research related to the COVID-19 pandemic and assisting critical infrastructure that can help speed up America’s economic recovery, according to the agency’s Deputy Director, George Barnes.
Speaking on a webcast hosted by the Intelligence National Security Alliance, Barnes provided an update on the agency’s cyber-focused directorate formed late last year. The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a whole host of additional challenges, increasing the collective digital threat surface as governments and businesses moved to mostly online operations and putting public health organizations and pharmaceutical companies working on a vaccine and other aspects of the response firmly in the crosshairs of nation-state hackers.
Barnes said the fallout from the pandemic has pushed the directorate to ask “how do we protect critical activities that are vital to us for getting back in a healthy state?” and enable Americans to get back to work and keep the economy moving. When it comes to protecting private and public medical research, the agency’s bread and butter — signals intelligence – can provide medical research organizations with insight into what information foreign governments are after as well as the tools and methods they’re using to get it.
While one of the directorate’s core missions is protecting national security systems such as nuclear command and control infrastructure, the organization has realized that many of the vulnerabilities they’re called upon to defend against are the result of poorly designed parts and components. A lack of coordination between the industries that create technologies and the governments who use them to protect cyberspace “we are not well positioned as a nation” to defend against digital espionage and supply chain compromises.
