Page 14 - FCW, Nov/Dec 2017

CYBERSECURITY
SPONSORED CONTENT
INNOVATION FUELS CYBER ADVANCES
New technologies and strategies provide government agencies with new ways to defend their networks.
FOR GOVERNMENT AGENCIES looking to improve their cybersecurity, innovation is the order of the day. It’s not just that today’s cyber threats are more sophisticated and numerous than ever before. It’s also that the IT environment has grown more complex,
as agencies have expanded their use of cloud, mobility, the Internet of Things and other solution areas.
This complexity, which creates a more extensive attack surface for bad actors, requires agencies to think in new ways about cybersecurity. Their existing tools might be su cient for the intended purposes, but new tools, tactics and strategies are needed.
Fortunately, recent months have brought a surge in innovation, as agencies at all levels of government have explored new possibilities for strengthening their cyber posture. Here is a look at some of the hottest areas of activity.
Michigan, on the other hand, is looking to take a longer view, trying to leverage its historical cyber threat data to become more e ective at predicting emerging threats. The center will work with data generated by a wide variety
of systems, such as rewalls, security appliances and intrusion detection systems, as well as data available through commercial services. The goal is to create models that,
when applied to current cyber data, can point experts towards emerging threats.
Still, more work needs to be done on the policy front, experts say. A key concern is overcoming institutional barriers to information sharing between the public and private sectors and across di erent levels of government.
Blockchain:
Foundation for Digital Government
Data Sharing and Analysis: Cyber Warning Systems
The proposition seems simple: The more information that agencies have on cyber threats, the better prepared they
will be to protect themselves. In practice, however, agencies often have struggled to implement the necessary policies, procedures and technologies needed to aggregate and analyze data from di erent sources. But that is beginning to change.
Los Angeles, for example, is launching an organization called CyberLabLA that eventually will facilitate the sharing of information among public and private sector organizations. Additionally, the city plans to build on that work by creating
a Cyber Lab Innovation Incubator, which will include a simulated city network that can be used both to test new cyber defenses and to train cyber experts.
To be fully realized, the vision for digital government is built on trust—trust in the integrity of digital transactions. That is, how can a citizen or organization be sure that data has not been tampered with in the course of a transaction?
One promising solution is blockchain technology. Blockchain is generally described as a distributed, trusted ledger of transactions. Each step of a transaction is validated by a participating node, with each validation linked to previous validations, forming a chain. If the transaction is intercepted by an unauthorized party, the chain is broken— and everyone knows it.
Because the ledger travels with the transaction, it does not require centralized management—which makes blockchain more easily scalable than alternative approaches, such as public key infrastructure.
The National Association of State CIOs has agged
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