Leading cybersecurity officials call for real collaboration between the public, private sectors to fend off threats of cyber threats – Office of…

Federal agencies fighting cyber adversaries must truly integrate their efforts and build a real partnership with the private sector to counter cyber threats, six public and private sector cyber security experts said Oct. 19 in a special panel discussion hosted by Auburn Universitys McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security.

Companies and federal agencies need to go beyond information-sharing and create a joint operational approach, said experts from the White House, NSA, FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA.

The discussion was moderated by McCrary Institute Director Frank Cilluffo, who described the participants as the Mount Rushmore of cyber security experts.

The cyber experts representing the public and private sectors were:

In the past, we focused on collecting various pieces of evidence to try to connect the dots and identify a potential threat, said Chris Inglis, the White House National Cyber Director. But today, the challenge is how to collaborate to discover a threat that none of us could have discovered alone.

The private sector is now on the front lines, as it builds, maintains and defends critical parts of our infrastructure. The government needs to shift to a more supportive role, bringing its resources to help secure the private sector. We need a structure where a transgressor in cyber space would need to beat all of us to beat any of us.

While the federal government is tasked with leading the fight, more than 85 percent of the nations critical infrastructure, including cyber networks, remain in private hands, enhancing the national security threat. Federal initiatives will have little impact if they are not built into private sector security operations, the participants noted.

What were undertaking now on the cyber side is a form of terrorism that holds companies unable to function. This requires an elevated level of collaboration like weve never seen before in the private sector, said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate.

Companies handle proprietary and sensitive information all the time, said NSA Director of Cyber Security Rob Joyce. What Ive seen in NSA in the last several months is weve been able to take that sensitive information, get it down to that unclassified level where its operational and work with companies in the defense industrial base. For years, weve had things go up, over, around and down. Frankly, thats too slow and often misinterpreted. Those are the kinds of things weve got to get to right.

To best protect private cyber infrastructure, panelists suggested becoming a more difficult cyber target through collaboration, trust, resilient cyber networks and building a strong, cyber-educated workforce beginning at an early age.

Cyber security is a team sport, said Department of Homeland Security CISA Director Jen Easterly. It really matters to have those trusted relationships. This is all about the future of partnerships, which is operational collaboration. The federal government is really just a co-equal partner with the private sector and state and local colleagues. It truly is about a collective defense, in particular given that we live in a highly digitized, highly connected and highly complex threatened environment, which is evolving every day.

If a company cant afford to protect itself, it probably cant afford to be in business, added Berkshire Hathaway Energy CEO William J. Fehrman. I know some companies share a significant concern about data being provided to the government. Will it be used for the purposes of national defense and critical infrastructure protection? Or will it be used for regulatory and legal reasons that could come back and hurt the companies? Moving this forward, there must be a confidence built across companies that when the collaboration is occurring, its occurring for the purposes of national defense and defensive critical infrastructure.

McCrary Institute Director Frank Cilluffo noted, Sometimes we have a plandemic of plans. Plans have no value unless we are ready to work together and act on them. I have grappled with the challenge of collaboration for decades, but I believe we finally have the team in place to get this done.

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Leading cybersecurity officials call for real collaboration between the public, private sectors to fend off threats of cyber threats - Office of...