Agencies must lock down their cyber defense

Every federal agency, no matter its size or mission, must provide proper cyber defenses for its systems, according to Patrick Howard, the chief information security officer of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a recent interview with Eric Chabrow, the managing editor of govinfosecurity.com, Howard said that every agency is vulnerable and can be the conduit for an attack. He should know. The NRC is probably on everyone's hit list.

"We can't just automatically assume that they are going to be just attacking someone else because they are more critical, what they work with is more critical than what we do," Howard said.

Howard said the NRC has a specific plan for developing a well-integrated information security plan. "We are building the government structure to do that. I think it is a matter to be able to support our mission, both the internal one, as far as how we protect information here internally, as well as the external one," he said.

Nevertheless, he suggested there are plenty of issues that keep him awake at night.

"State-sponsored cyber attacks are something that is substantially different than it was five years ago," he said. "I think there is more of a persistent threat because of the capabilities of the attackers, of those that are trying to exploit our systems. They have a great deal of capability and resources and patience to be able to attack our networks in a expediently greater way than an individual hacker would have been able to in years past or even now. I think it's probably those large groups, the state sponsored attackers that are probing in a lot of cases and are already inside of our networks."

For more on the NRC's CISO:
- check out this govinfosecurity.com article

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