Cyberattacks threaten global security | ASU News
Director of US National Security Agency discusses cyber warfare at ASU event
The United States is engaged in a quiet but potentially devastating intelligence, cyber and information war, with the greatest threats to national security coming from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
That was the topic of a webinar on “Confronting Current and Future Cybersecurity Threats,” hosted Wednesday by Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War.
“As you think about what computers have evolved to these days, they’ve gotten so much more entwined in everything we do — whether it’s the information on our computer desktop all the way out to the military’s weapons,” said Rob Joyce, director of the U.S. National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate.
Part of the mission of the agency is to partner with allies, private industry and academics to strengthen awareness and collaboration, and advance the state of cybersecurity.
Joyce was joined by retired Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle, professor of practice in the Center on the Future of War and School of Politics and Global Studies, and Daniel Rothenberg, a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies and co-director of the Center on the Future of War.
Rosenberg asked if a devastating and fundamentally destabilizing cyberattack is imminent and inevitable in American society.
“Yeah it is,” said Joyce, citing the 2021 ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which was caused by one compromised password that led to major fuel shortages.
“So, it is not unimaginable.”
Beyond government computers
A cyberattack on the U.S. government would be far-reaching, going beyond its official web of networks to thousands of partner companies, defense contractors, subcontractors and more.
According to Joyce, the ecosystem consists of 30,000 cleared companies that work as subcontractors and 300,000 companies that feed into the defense department. It is an enormous amount of tech surface that adversaries can get into in order to steal information, manipulate data and more.
“So we were…
