FORT MEADE, Md. — The National Security Agency (NSA) Cybersecurity Collaboration Center released the latest video in its Cybersecurity Speaker Series today, focusing on the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). The DIB consists of hundreds of thousands of technology, manufacturing, and service companies around the world that design, develop, and produce the Department of Defense’s critical systems, platforms and technologies required to defend the nation.
The Speaker Series highlights subject matter experts at NSA sharing insights, lessons, and contributions of their work in cybersecurity. This episode features a discussion between Cybersecurity Technical Fellow Dr. Josiah Dykstra and Kristina Walter, Chief, Defense Industrial Base Cybersecurity, about the DIB and its importance to NSA’s cybersecurity mission.
“For us in the Collaboration Center, it’s all about partnerships,” said Walter. “We work directly with the DIB companies and their service providers across three main efforts to help prevent the theft of data and IP. The first is bi-directional sharing of cybersecurity information — we don’t all have a full picture, and we’ve learned that continuous conversation is better than transactional information sharing, which is where NSA was before these efforts started. Second, we have the ability to collaborate, sometimes side-by-side, in spaces like this, across unclassified networks, to jointly develop tradecraft to identify malicious actors and stop them in their tracks and third, we develop, share and amplify tailored mitigation guidance to the DIB.”
These collaborative relationships help leverage the unique strength of government and industry combined in real time — allowing for jointly developed mitigation guidance as a part of a whole-of-nation approach to the new landscape of cybersecurity. Interested companies can visit cybercenter.nsa.gov for more information or email dib_defense@cyber.nsa.gov.
Check out the latest Speaker Series video on the DIB, and be sure to visit the YouTube channel for other episodes in the series.