Preventing cyberattacks is more important than ever and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Cybersecurity Collaboration Center is working with government and industry partners to share information and tackle cybersecurity as a “team sport.”
Speaking at FedInsider’s virtual event, Cyberattacks 2021: The Landscape of Evolving Threats, Morgan Adamski, chief of NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, said these partnerships are “critical” to preventing cyberattacks.
“Cybersecurity is a team sport. Partnership is critical because no one organization has the full picture,” Adamski said. “The main point when we think about preparing the U.S. against the next cyberattacks and the importance of the private-public partnership is we can’t be doing information sharing in a time of crisis. We have to do it when we are not in a time of crisis and have time to actually think through.”
According to Adamski, NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center is focused on three channels: detecting, innovating, and mitigating.
“We’re detecting the adversary by leveraging both our access to signals intelligence, commercial data, and that bidirectional threat sharing with the private sector,” Adamski said. “We’re innovating new tradecraft by discovering and tracking the adversary – that’s really critical because if we’re just sharing that transactional information, we’re not really developing the next way by which we’re going to find that adversary. And lastly, we’re mitigating by developing and sharing that amplifying guidance to national security systems, the Department of Defense [DoD], and the Defense Industrial Base [DIB].”
Adamski stressed that while this information is helpful to the DoD and DIB, it’s also applicable to other network owners and users across the country. She also clarified that information sharing does not mean “the transactional or the tactical sharing of indicators of compromise,” but instead “a contextual conversation about the threats that we’re seeing, to our networks and what mitigations we’re putting in place.”
“Information sharing is critical in that public-private partnership because we have to leverage our unique expertise and perspectives,” Adamski said. “We continue to do this and we’re trying to do this more, and lean forward by providing actionable, unique, and timely cybersecurity advisories and guidance for refinement and forewarning to our partners. We want this to be usable at all levels of the government and by all network owners.”
Adamski encouraged those who want to access information that NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center has published regarding cyber updates to go to NSA.gov/cybersecurity or to follow them on Twitter @NSACyber.
