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NSA seeks tighter ties to tech despite issues of data-sharing |
September 22, 2013
The National Security Agency's director of information assurance said the "way to achieve confidence in cyberspace" is to increase collaboration between the government and the high-tech industry—remarks that rang ironic given former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about how NSA works with industry.
NSA documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA's goal is to build backdoors into commercial products and weaken encryption to make it easier for surveillance, allegations that the U.S. government has not even tried to refute. When asked about that today, NSA director of information assurance Debora Plunkett, who gave the keynote address at the New York Institute of Technology Cyber Security Conference in New York City, flatly refused to discuss the topic. But her keynote address was intended to get hardware and software vendors to work in ever-closer partnership with the NSA.
Debora Plunkett
Cyberattacks that could take electricity grids offline and disrupt transportation systems are possible, Plunkett said in her keynote, pointing out the destructive attack that hit Saudi Aramco last year and impacted data systems there.
It's a simple matter to hire hacking services to carry out attacks such as denial-of-service, she said, and the fear now is of "integrity attacks" that would destroy or alter critical data. These are all "cyber security challenges," she noted, and the government today is largely dependent on commercial hardware and software for which the NSA itself cannot "provide indemnification." NSA's needs industry's help, she said.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049146/nsa-seeks-tighter-ties-to-tech-despite-issues-of-data-sharing.html#tk.rss_all
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