BAKER NOTABLE NSA PRESENTATION FROM DEFCON 2018
NSA Robert Joyce Interview DefCon 2018
1) People are going to try to mess with the elections, we might as well be on top of it, analyze the weaknesses and acknowledge it here openly at DefCon.
2) The media has mis-portrayed the NSA.
3) People are choosing (he emphasizes CHOOSING again) to give their information over to big social media sites.
4) Half of the people in the world have internet access now.
5) Mobile devices are backed up by the cloud.
6) Cyber is no longer just about gathering information, it is about imposing nation-state power.
7) Cyrpto-currency exchange in Japan lost 1/2 billion dollars in January to a theft, but because it's crypto the average person didn't pay any attention to it.
8) China is using its cyber infrastructure to establish a social control system. The "social credit system" they are rolling out. Think the show "Person of Interest"
9) A lot of bad guys are having their way on the internet; including election hacking, and it's only becoming easier as the methods of delivery are made easier to use (think intelligence operatives who don't know computers in and out but make it a mission to attack our way of life).
10) Everyone is worried about zero-day attacks, but infiltrating established security protocols and using them in nefarious ways is much more problematic in the long term. (Feinstein spies?)
11) There can be a lot of unintended fallout from cyber attacks nowadays. Witness the way in which Russia's attack on Ukraine's infrastructure propagated beyond the Ukraine and affected global shipping supply chains.
12) A single theft by a nation state of intellectual property is just that: theft, but over time it becomes a campaign that slowly bleeds our economy dry.
13) America has been geographically isolated from the wars around the world, but cyber has opened up a whole new front that can no longer be ignored.
14) NSA is working with DHS.
15) One of the primary focuses of NSA is infosec, specifically the non-repudiation portion of infosec; i.e. making sure someone can't say it wasn't them that sent information later on. (Adm. R testimony?
16) 4 nation states do not abide by generally accepted internet norms: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
17) Russian is the most skilled adversary in the cyber space while China is the most volumous in its attacks. DPRK is unique in that it focuses a lot of its attacks on hard currencies i.e. banks via the Swift network (81 million stolen).
18) A big difference between then and now is that the United States government no longer produces much of its devices, but relies on commercial devices.