By Marina Malenic
The Defense Department wants to cut the development and deployment timeline for new network protective technology and bolster ties with its cyber security defense industrial base as cyber threats continue to mount, the Pentagon’s top official for cyber policy said yesterday.
Defense contractors in the cyber arena will play a critical role in the coming years as the department bolsters its “active” defenses for scanning incoming code and protecting networks, Robert Butler, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, told reporters.
“What we want to do is create a very tight partnership with industry,” he said during a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
He said the department also must help create a robust supply chain that would be resilient to various types of interruption.
Butler said the department’s future spending on cyber security is still being studied. However, a new national defense strategy for cyberspace operations should be in place before the end of the year.
Butler and other top U.S. defense officials have said that the threat from malicious software and code is growing.
“We are facing so much activity from so many different actors,” he said, adding that both states and non-state actors are of concern.
While the Department of Homeland Security is the lead U.S. agency on cyber defense, a new agreement forged between DoD and DHS earlier this month “sets up an opportunity for DHS to take advantage of the expertise” within DoD and the National Security Agency, said Butler (Defense Daily, Oct. 14)
The agencies “will help each other in more tangible ways then they have in the past” as a result of the new arrangement, he said. For example, a senior DHS cyber official will begin working inside the NSA in the near future.
Beyond operational concepts, the government is still working out matters of terminology in the cyber domain, Butler noted.
“As we move forward, one of the key things we have is to agree on is the taxonomy,” he said.
“Over the course of the next several months, I think we’ll sort through a lot of this,” he added.