Taking a page for cybersecurity from the counter

The Obama administration is taking a page out of the counter-terrorism playbook to help it secure the nation against hackers, cyberspies and other online threats, a White House official said Tuesday.

The Obama administration is taking a page out of the counter-terrorism playbook to help it secure the nation against hackers, cyberspies and other online threats, a White House official said Tuesday.

Just as the National Counter-Terrorism Center is an all-source intelligence fusion hub for terrorist threats, so the new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, or CTIIC, is for cyber threats, Andrew Grotto, senior director for cybersecurity policy at the White House National Security Council told FedTalks.

“From threat summaries to in-depth analysis, CTIIC has become the place to go for policymakers” needing actionable intelligence, Grotto added.

And CTIIC was just one example of the way the administration was tying together roles of various federal agencies, he said, learning from the experience of coordinating counter-terrorism policy.

“One of the key lessons here is developing muscle-memory between and across federal agencies,” Grotto explained, so that in a crisis, everyone knows what their role is.   

That’s why President Barack Obama in July signed Presidential Policy Directive 41 on cyber incident coordination — “Improving our ability to respond [to] and recover from cyberattacks,” as Grotto put it.

He reminded a packed house at the Sidney Harman Hall in Washington that, when Obama was first campaigning to be president, the iPhone was brand new, and we lived in a very different technological world.

Over the eight years of the Obama administration, he said “I’ve watched cybersecurity evolve from a niche subject of concern to intelligence agencies and IT specialists, into a major national issue.”

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure