The National Security Agency published a news feature today that provides a new, NSA-developed resource for organizations looking to promote the well-being of their cybersecurity personnel. Dr. Celeste Lyn-Paul, senior researcher and technical advisor at NSA Research, and Dr. Josiah Dykstra, deputy technical director of NSA Cybersecurity Operations, developed the Cyber Operations Stress Survey (COSS) to help gauge stress levels of security personnel in high-risk environments.
The National Security Agency’s (NSA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) has for the first time released its semi-annual report to Congress as an unclassified document, and in the process shed light on IT deficiencies at the agency. The report, released Wednesday and covering the period of October 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, highlights multiple audits that found numerous issues in the governance of NSA’s IT infrastructure and its subsequent ability to mitigate cybersecurity risk.
Leaders in the Federal intelligence community, speaking last Tuesday at Defense One’s Tech Summit, said that their agencies are using vast stores of data, machine learning, and neural networks to go beyond simple fact-finding, to now radically re-envision how the intelligence community acts on credible information. But with these advances in technology come thorny new ethical and procedural questions, those officials said.
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk.
The U.S. Cyber Command is ready for its close-up. The command announced May 17 that all 133 of its Cyber Mission Teams are fully operational, capping a roughly one-month stretch that saw the arrival of a new commander, the opening of a new operations center, and the official designation of Cybercom as a full unified combatant command.
John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, may not be hunting for a replacement for Rob Joyce, the current White House cybersecurity coordinator, who previously announced he would leave his post and return to the National Security Agency later this month.
Army Lieutenant General Paul Nakasone is taking over this afternoon as chief of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency. At the same time, U.S. Cyber Command is being elevated to the level of a full unified military command, the Defense Department said today.
The Air Force has awarded five small businesses contracts that could top out at $950 million for the rapid development of new cyber capabilities. This contract continues an effort by the service, and the Department of Defense overall, to keep up with potential adversaries in the fast-changing cyber domain.
As the deadline to renew the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers looms, proposed bills and speculations of bills drive the conversation on national security versus privacy. Senate Republicans led by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., proposed a bill in June to completely renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any changes or sunset provision. Section 702, which expires at the end of the year, allows the NSA to collect data from foreign nationals without obtaining a warrant.
President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 18 that he directed United States Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) to be elevated to full combatant command.
The National Security Agency gave Columbus State University in Georgia a $174,000 grant to develop a cybersecurity training tool. “We are building a tool that people across the nation can use to develop cybersecurity training, which guarantees compliance with government and industry standards for cybersecurity workforce development,” said Shuangbao “Paul” Wang, a professor in CSU’s TSYS School of Computer Science.
The U.S. Cyber Command will begin to exercise its newly granted acquisition authority by the end of 2017 with its first industry day on Oct. 27. Congress gave CYBERCOM its own ability to purchase technology capabilities in order to keep up with the constantly changing nature of the cybersecurity sphere. CYBERCOM plans to hold its industry day at the Arthur Lundahl Conference Center in Springfield, Va.
The Government Accountability Office evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command’s dual-hat leadership system and found that the system causes tension between the two agencies due to competing interests.
The National Security Agency could use traffic shaping, rerouting Internet traffic to a location better suited for surveillance, The Century Foundation found in a report.
Representatives of the intelligence community said that they want the surveillance powers outlined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to be renewed without amendment or sunset clause this year.
Amid reports that the National Security Agency failed to protect sensitive data after leaks by contractor Edward Snowden, the agency created a GitHub account to share open source code.
The revelation that the National Security Agency conducted blanket surveillance of spectators at the 2002 Olympic Games could hurt the agency’s chances of getting its surveillance laws renewed this year. Thomas Drake, former NSA executive, submitted a formal declaration on May 25 that revealed the NSA’s program Stellar Wind, the goal of which was to “collect and store virtually all electronic communication going in or out” of the Salt Lake City area.
A group of prominent technology companies wrote a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asking Congress to reform the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The technology companies include Adobe, Amazon, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft.
Rob Joyce, cybersecurity coordinator for the White House, has the opportunity to heal tensions between the intelligence community and the technology industry in the wake of the WannaCry ransomware attack.
The U.S. government workforce is not prepared to deal with the kind of information warfare that Russia used to influence the 2016 presidential election and has continued to use in the elections of other nations, U.S. Cyber Command and NSA Chief Admiral Michael Rogers told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The National Security Agency announced last week that it will stop collecting Americans’ emails about foreign targets. However, this is a small amount of data compared to the rest of the information that the NSA collects.
Microsoft announced that it had already patched the vulnerabilities that were disclosed by the Shadow Brokers hacker group last week.
A group of Delaware National Guard officers crowd around a computer as code flashes down the screen. One of them thinks he found a back door that will enable him to access the administrator credentials to the Naval Academy’s networks. Once they have the credentials, they can access the school’s “token,” a piece of classified information that the academy has been assigned to protect.
Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said that the section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the NSA to collect information on foreign nationals is “instrumental” in providing Congress with intelligence.
President Donald Trump picked National Security Agency official Rob Joyce to lead White House cybersecurity policy issues during a time when NSA surveillance powers are up for discussion and bad blood exists between the NSA and industry.
Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, envisions that Cyber Command should contract private companies to build cyber weapons in the next five to 10 years.
Several technology industry groups sent a letter to members of Congress last week asking them to discuss privacy implications if they choose to renew a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which gives the National Security Agency broad powers to collect information on foreign citizens.
The National Security Agency approved both Windows 10 and Surface devices to be operated with classified workloads under the Commercial Solutions for Classified Programs list, Microsoft announced.
National Security Agency contractor Harold T. Martin III was indicted on charges of stealing 50 terabytes of classified data, which included information on sensitive counterterrorism operations.
If the National Security Agency and Cyber Command were to split, NSA Executive Director Corin Stone explained that any disagreements between the agencies would be decided by the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence, to ensure fair judgment.