The entirety of the internet is an infinite attack surface. Figuring out how to secure the information and communications transported through the cyber domain is a daunting task, and it’s one that the Pentagon’s Protecting Critical Technology Task Force is exploring all options to meet. Including, even, a reduction in transparency and a return to security through obscurity.
“The task force that I'm associated with is protecting today in order to ensure that there's a tomorrow,” said Major General Thomas Murphy, director of the Protecting Critical Technology Task Force. “ It might be a little bit of hyperbole there. But I would tell you that if our weapon systems don't work the way that they're intended at a time and place of our choosing, we're going to have a serious problem.”
Murphy’s remarks came as part of the Fifth Domain Cybercon conference held in Arlington, Virginia, November 12, 2019. The task force is housed in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and was stood up in October 2018. The task force describes its broad mandate as protecting “critical technologies wherever they reside.”
To that end, the force is looking at improving cybersecurity in the companies that make military technology, or the industrial base; protecting military technology R&D, be it at universities or labs; block foreign investment and acquisition of military technologies, largely though not exclusively through export controls; and to deny access to those technologies to adversaries.
Of particular concern is not just the loss of intellectual property, but of existing technology being adapted by rivals or used to find weaknesses in deployed weapons.
“We've in effect become the R&D base for our adver ..
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