White House Plans Proactive Cyber-Security Role for Spy Agencies

The country’s intelligence agencies may soon be asked to gather intelligence on threats to the nation’s computer networks under a new White House policy. Will it shore up our defenses against cyberattack?

In an article in the Washington Post, an unnamed White House official told writer Brian Krebs the Bush administration wants to harness the intelligence community’s offensive capabilities to defend both government and civilian computer systems.

“We’ve never looked at how all the unique things this government wages against others could be used to inform our defensive posture,” the official told Krebs. “We really need to move from [the reality that] the advantage is always with the attacker to how we can have our offense better inform our defense to shrink that gap.”

The official also told Krebs the intelligence community is uniquely suited to counteract today’s malicious actors who are constantly developing new attacks and exploiting unknown security holes in software and hardware to compromise government networks.

“This [is] an important and perhaps one of the most important national security and economic security issues facing us today,” the official added. “We want a broader information flow to the private sector of the threats we're seeing, so that they can increase their security posture as well.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050201646.html