Morgan Adamski, director of the National Security Agency's (NSA) Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, says candidly that cybersecurity can be tricky. But by sharing information and working closely with businesses large and small, her organization is helping break through this madness.
NSA established the Collaboration Center in December 2020 to work with industry, other U.S. agencies, and international partners to protect the defense industrial base from foreign cyber activity. This industrial base consists of companies and major service providers that work with the Department of Defense on a variety of programs and technologies, including cryptography, weapons and space, and nuclear command and control.
The Collaboration Center provides free services to the industry, including domain name protection services, attack surface management, and threat intelligence collaboration.
In its first year, the center disclosed numerous vulnerabilities, including a series of five critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange that were subject to patching by vendors, according to the NSA article. The center collaborates cross-disciplinaryly with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to investigate threats to 5G security, publishes a series of papers on threats, processes more than 3.8 billion queries, and blocked over 6.5 million malicious domains, including Russian Spear. – Phishing, botnets and malware. He also served on technical committees that developed 12 international standards for secure internet protocols, 5G security, and enterprise IT security.
Things haven't slowed down since then. “It's been a crazy three years,” Adamski said in a recent interview. signal media. Adamski estimates the organization has had 30,000 analytics conversations with partners over the past year.
When I asked her what we can expect from the Collaboration Center next year, she explained why it's hard to predict. “I want to tell you that at the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, we address different vulnerabilities every day. Malicious state activity against critical infrastructure is supporting the likes of Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas. “We are involved in any crisis or conflict that the National Security Agency can be involved in,” she said. “I hope we don't have a typical cybersecurity year, but I think since I've been here we've had SolarWinds, Log4j, MOVEit. There's been too many cybersecurity incidents. So I'm sure we're going to have to deal with some disruption over the next year.”
During the interview, Mr. Adamski gave the impression of someone who thoroughly enjoys his job, laughing as he joked several times about the madness and chaos, but spoke with conviction about the mission and the collaboration center's success. . “Throughout all of these crises, we have always had success with our industry partners, who have provided us with powerful intelligence and provided us with defensive measures.”
