The Christian Science Monitor

How a full-spectrum approach including defensive cyber, active defense and cyber resiliency keeps America ahead of digital threats.

Cybersecurity’s biggest challenge today is straightforward to describe and extremely hard to fix: you can’t see the threat before it hits you. Cyber defenders have little to no warning that an intruder is lurking just beyond their borders.

That’s why we see cyber technology as more than just the passive understanding of protecting our systems. Taking a position of active defense means looking not at just protecting the network, but the protection of the network and the constant monitoring of the network to identify threats. When we talk about full-spectrum cyber, we’re talking about taking it even one step further. Not only are you protecting your environment, you’re monitoring that environment and now when you identify or find an indication that a threat is coming, you can defeat that threat preemptively.

Taking a full-spectrum operations approach is about a very deliberate effort to defeat the threat before the threat comes into the system. We do that in some cases by understanding the attacker’s vulnerabilities and issuing our own cyber initiatives that exploit those vulnerabilities.Simultaneously, we are investing in advanced forms of defense, what we call cyber resiliency. Cyber resiliency looks to not only protect the environment from the outside, that end point of the information sphere, but also how to understand what malicious actors are already inside the network, identifying that threat and then protecting and healing the network as that threat is being removed from the system. Finally, rounding out this picture of understanding where threats are coming from involves looking at cybersecurity from a global standpoint. There’s a greater requirement and a need for us to communicate with our allies because the threat does not focus just on one entity or one country.