Page 5 - Cyber Warnings

WHAT IS NEXT FOR U. S. NATIONAL CYBERSECURITY?

Robert B. Dix, Jr.
Vice President, Global Government Affairs & Public Policy

Juniper Networks

Now that legislation intended to improve bi-directional cybersecurity information sharing between
government and industry has been passed by the Congress and signed by the President as part of
the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, what are the next steps that should be addressed to
improve overall national cybersecurity? While improving the exchange of cybersecurity related
information between industry and government is important, it must be understood that sharing alone
is not the end game.

The real objective must be establishing a national capability that can generate timely, reliable, and
actionable situational awareness to help inform the cyber risk management decision making effort
across the stakeholder community. Much work lies ahead to address cyber and physical security
necessary to achieve and maintain secure and resilient critical infrastructure. The proliferation and
reliance on mobile devices and the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) provides clear and
compelling evidence about how this issue will continue to present an enormous challenge to
national and economic security.

A concern by some is that some legislators and even some in the Administration may conclude that
the cybersecurity protection job is done. Those that engage these issues every day know much
different. There are a number of basic, common sense measures that are long overdue and should
be prioritized immediately if we are truly serious about meeting the cybersecurity challenge and
helping make our nation safer and more secure.

Actionable cyber situational awareness can only be accomplished through information sharing,
analysis, and collaboration necessary to improve the detection, prevention, mitigation, and
response to cyber events that may become incidents of national or even global consequence.
Simply pushing large volumes of threat indicators without context or analysis necessary to identify
patterns and trends of abnormal, anomalous, or even malicious behavior, is simply driving numbers,
not results.

While numbers might be impressive to the uninformed or under-informed, just pushing numbers
from the government absent that analysis necessary to identify the most frequent attack vectors and
separate noise from impact, will just continue the huge gap that exists today in the ability to meet
the growing and increasingly dangerous cybersecurity challenge.

In addition, as a nation we must move beyond the over-classification of information and threat
intelligence that could assist industry and other stakeholders in making informed cyber risk
management decisions. The government owns and has access to the majority of cyber threat
intelligence; however, very little is shared in a timely manner with industry partners. Identifying and
understanding the tactics, techniques, and procedures being utilized by the adversaries… not the

5 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – January 2016 Edition
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