The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is having trouble gaining visibility into the masses of data on its networks even as the agency modernizes IT systems, a top official at NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI) said today.
As the number of connected devices explode and attack surfaces rapidly expand, NIH has faced difficulties with some enterprise tools that manage the network perimeter, Craig Hayn, NCI’s Chief Information Security Officer and Chief of Cybersecurity Branch, said at the Adapt 2024 conference in Washington.
“We’ve had a struggle to just get our data set so we can view it,” Hayn said.
But NCI and NIH broadly have fared better with what Hayn called “a ton” of lingering legacy systems. “The way we deal with legacy might be unique for us,” he said. “We kind of quarantine it and put it away, and we keep it out of view.”
He added that NIH IT officials are still finding ways to retrieve essential data that remains on older systems. “Maybe it’s not a modern app,” he said, “but we can still get that data … I think it’s given us the ability to manage legacy much more effectively.”
NIH has focused its IT modernization on cloud adoption, an effort that officials say has saved the agency millions of dollars and helped cancer researchers at NCI.
Hyne spoke at an Adapt session about cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM), which gives organizations a comprehensive asset inventory by integrating with hundreds of existing data sources to compile a comprehensive, normalized inventory of all assets – internal and external, cloud, and on premises.
Axonius Federal Systems executives say they came up with the CAASM concept, out of a belief that getting a count of assets that could be compromised by cyberattacks was as important as stopping cyber threats and finding the culprits.
CAASM was named an emerging technology in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations 2022.