Cybersecurity Focus Shifting to Globalization and Chain of Trust

Homeland Security Today, 10/24/12

The globalization of coding and chip manufacturing is one of the biggest issues facing US national cybersecurity, according to a top technical director at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the former chief information officer at the CIA.

“Attackers today are not just going after the endpoint on the value chain,” said Neil Ziring, the technical director for the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate. Increasingly, hackers are targeting systems, software and devices earlier in their lifecycle and development phases in an effort to make it easier for them to penetrate networks later on, said Ziring.

“This is an area where we all need to improve,” said Ziring, who spoke Oct. 23 at the Red Hat® Government Symposium in Washington, DC.