Privacy Digest

White House Plans Proactive Cyber-Security Role for Spy Agencies - Via washingtonpost.com - Technology:

America's spy agencies for the first time would be tasked with gathering intelligence on threats to the nation's computer networks under a policy that could be detailed by the White House as early as next week, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Speaking at a security conference in Washington, the official said the Bush administration wants to harness the intelligence community's offensive capabilities in defense of 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," said the official, who asked not to be named because the White House has not yet released details about the plan. "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."

In January, President Bush signed a directive authorizing the intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, to monitor all federal network traffic to prevent attackers from breaking in and from stealing sensitive data or disrupting critical systems.

The administration official said the intelligence community is uniquely suited to counteract today's malicious actors -- ranging from lone hackers to organized cyber criminal groups and nation states -- who the official said are constantly developing new attacks and exploiting unknown security holes in software and hardware to compromise government networks.

The official said the president's new cyber-security directive will share the intelligence gleaned through monitoring threats across the government space with the private sector, which experts say is being hit with the same types of attacks that the federal dot-gov space is battling.

"This an important and perhaps one of the most important national security and economic security issues facing us today," the official said. "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."

Most of the 18 strategic goals laid out in the cyber initiative are currently classified, and few within the government have been fully briefed on the the plan. But the official said the administration plans to release additional details on at least 12 of those goals next week, after the White House Office of Management and Budget issues rules for assigning classification levels for data collected and shared under the new program. An OMB spokesperson confirmed that the White House plans to release the classification memo as early as next week.

(Read Original Article - Via washingtonpost.com - Technology.)