uncertainty around US cybersecurity priorities that was on display this week at two of the country’s most prominent digital security conferences in Las Vegas. “We are not retreating, we’re advancing in a new direction,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency chief information officer Robert Costello said on Thursday during a critical infrastructure defense panel at Black Hat.
former US National Security Agency and Cyber Command chief Paul Nakasone spoke with Defcon founder Jeff Moss in an onstage discussion on Friday, focusing on AI, cybercrime, and the importance of partnerships in digital defense.
“I think we’ve entered a space now in the world where technology has become political and basically every one of us is conflicted,” Moss said at the beginning of the discussion
Nakasone also reflected on demographic differences between the US federal government and the tech sector.
“When I was the director of NSA and commander of US Cyber Command, every single quarter I would go to the Bay or I’d go to Texas or Boston or other places to see technology,” he said. “And every place that I went to, I was twice the age of the people that talked to me. And then when I came back to DC and I sat at the table, I was one of the younger people there. OK, that’s a problem. That’s a problem for our nation.”
Throughout the discussion, Nakasone largely geared his remarks toward efforts to counter traditional US rivals and adversaries, including China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as well as specific digital threats.
“Why aren’t we thinking differently about ransomware, which I think right now is among the great scourges that we have in our country,” he said. “We are not making progress against ransomware.”
Referencing these remarks and comments Moss had made about turning to open source software platforms as a community-building alternative to multinational tech companies, Nakasone hinted at Moss’ notion that the world is entering a precarious state of flux.