"The message, bottom line, is that government and its partners in the private sector have a common mission in which all have a role to play. The message for the conference will be the role that both government and private sector are moving towards a Trusted Computing model that can help protect our most sensitive information and our critical infrastructure from the collective threats of cyber-criminals, unfriendly nation states and terrorist organizations that act on a political agenda – or just out of pure spleen."
Neil RoiterSeptember 20, 2011
From the Stramella Keynote: The World Grows More Dangerous – Are We Up to the Threats?
It’s not that Anthony Stramella’s presentation on the threat landscape broke any particularly new ground – none of the “I can tell you but then I will have to kill you” stuff that I would still want to hear, even it kills me.
But, with the delivery of a Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, he drew a graphic picture of billions of people and devices – and their companies — at risk and under constant attack in a highly connected world. It’s a world in which vast amounts of information are stored and transmitted at incredible speeds.
Stramella, special assistant to the director at NSA’s Central Service Threat Operations Center, only hinted at the nastiest stuff NSA is dealing with. But discussing the known threats and publically known major security incidents, he asks, “These are the things that everyone knows are going on. Can you imagine what sophisticated adversaries are doing?”
The point is that Stramella can more than imagine, while most of the rest of us have to do our best to understand what he and his NSA colleagues are up against. He stressed how the role of NSA has changed with the threat environment, as the ability to respond to national threats has changed from days waiting for the enemy to send the fleets and troops, to 25 minutes after the missiles launch to….no time at all. The danger is that the first we’ll know of a major cyber attack is when critical systems fail.
The threat operations center are tasked in particular with detecting and reacting to the nastiest threats, activity that Stramella describes, in very technical terms, as “a lot of people looking at very sophisticated, serious bad stuff. Our job is to find and understand that stuff.” The challenge is staggering in terms of the volume and speed of data pouring in, requiring extremely high-end computers (such as Gray Jaguar and even faster machines in China and Japan and faster ones in the works at U.S.) to have the capability to decrypt and analyze.
Much of the presentation presented was at a level that was perhaps a little basic for the conference audience— social engineering, hundreds of thousands of insecure phone apps, unprotected virtual systems without adequate backup and DR plans, people exposing their personal information to anyone and everyone, all in what amounts to a single global network in which anyone can communicate with anyone, anywhere, any time.
But, the collective impact of his message was that the bad guys have something of an upper hand in a world in which people are surprisingly (well, maybe not so much) trusting and careless in their online behavior, despite the messages that have been pounded into them in recent years.
The message, bottom line, is that government and its partners in the private sector have a common mission in which all have a role to play. The message for the conference will be the role that both government and private sector are moving towards a Trusted Computing model that can help protect our most sensitive information and our critical infrastructure from the collective threats of cyber-criminals, unfriendly nation states and terrorist organizations that act on a political agenda – or just out of pure spleen.
Mr. Roiter is a security writer who is not affiliated with the NSA
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