The National Security Agency (NSA) Cybersecurity Collaboration Center (CCC) Defense Industrial Base (DIB) defense chief is focused on strengthening the cybersecurity of small and medium-sized businesses within the DIB.
“The vast majority of the DIB, 70 percent, are small and medium-sized businesses,” Bailey Bickley, NSA CCC's director of DIB defense, said at the Qualys conference in Washington, D.C., on May 21. “We're not alone against an adversary like the People's Republic of China.”
“We have to help them more,” she continued. “They should have the government on their side; [NSA CCC]. “
Bickley said part of the NSA CCC's job is to provide direct assistance and support to small and medium-sized businesses, “whether it's in the form of a service they sign up to protect their networks or just participate in a collaboration channel.” He explained.
“The key is that if we have actionable information, we need to accelerate the time to release that information,” she said. “That’s our job and our role, and I think we’re doing it very well.”
Bickley explained that she has been with the NSA for 16 years and one trend has remained throughout this time. That means nation-state actors continue to target family-run businesses.
The DIB defense chief said her team offers three services that address network security and is actively planning to expand to four: Currently, they provide small defense contractors with protected domain name systems; unclassified threat intelligence; and attack surface management.
Bickley boasted that the NSA had successfully thwarted 70 million instances of malicious cyber activity.
Going forward, she said, her team is “focused on expanding our services in a very strategic way.”
“We currently have over 1,000 customers signed up for the service, which is a great milestone for us, but DIB is huge. We have 300,000 customers and that number changes daily based on contracts. , it fluctuates,” Bickley said.
She added: “How do we find out which small businesses are most likely to be targeted?” And how do we prioritize support for them?”
