A look at General Alexander’s RSA Speech

Last week, General Alexander (director of NSA and commander, USCYBERCOM) spoke at the RSA conference in San Francisco. He pointed out the the explosion of technology over the past 10 years. That users went from an average of 250MB of personal files, to over 128GB. The fact that 70% of Americans online are on Facebook – that 600M users worldwide are as well. This, mixed with the huge advances in programming (Watson and Deep Blue) lets us know that we do have the capability to protect and defend our advanced networks.

General Alexander reminded us of attacks on Estonia (2007) and Georgia (2008) as well Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. His concern is that some of those attacks might be used on the 15K DoD networks. These networks are scanned over 1 million times a day, yet receive 20k email attacks a month, thousands of independent network assaults. The DoD is scanning 92TB+ and 150B+ packets every day.

The biggest problem is that our public/private infrastructure is the backbone to the network. Additionally, there is a need to secure the defense industrial base. This was made certain by the USB flash drive issues in 2008. General Alexander states, ”Take combined talent and figure out how we secure the network.” The “combined talent” is that in academia, private industry, and public servants.

He highlighted these needs for CYBERCOM;

• Need to operate in Cyber Domain
• Active Defense – key change for military networks and how they operate
• How to protect critical infrastructure and key resources – have to partner w/ DHS + industry to develop critical infrastructure and key resources
• Create lasting partnerships across the globe – there is only one internet and we are all plugged into it
• Leverage technical dominance – the US is innovating and needs to continue to use those innovations to stay technically dominant

General Alexander feels that active defense is the key – we are facing an opponent that is performing guerrilla attacks on our networks. His vision of active defense has the following attributes;

• Dynamic – ability to change due to the threat profile
• Customized – tailored to individual agencies and missions
• Countermeasures – capability to turn
• Team-Based – multiple systems and organizations working together
  • hunt inside networks for capabilities
  • how we work on boundaries
  • responsibility on military and IC for early-warning and indications (how can this be done?
• Needs to be more than anti-virus and patch management