Earlier this summer, the Obama administration deployed a new cybersecurity strategy that allows private infrastructure to tap into the cyber expertise of NSA and the Department of Homeland Security. According to this column by David Ignatius in The Washington Post, in a test initiative dubbed DIB Cyber Pilot with 20 defense contractors, “Homeland Security worked with four major Internet service providers, or ISPs, to help them clean malicious software from the Internet feed going to the contractors.”
“The experiment has been running for 90 days now, and officials say that it’s working. The ISPs have blocked hundreds of attempted intrusions before they could get to the defense companies.”
The economic potential of this program for our area is huge. Any expansion of NSA’s cyber mission is likely to mean even more jobs in and around Fort Meade
“The National Security Council soon will be debating whether to extend this pilot program to other sectors of critical infrastructure. Obvious candidates are the big financial institutions supervised by the Treasury Department and the national laboratories and nuclear-energy facilities overseen by the Energy Department.”
