From: Nextgov
By Aliya Sternstein
The U.S. military has tapped an IBM executive to encourage Pentagon contractors to come clean about network breaches that might compromise government data, Defense Department officials said on Wednesday.
Daniel Prieto III will serve as director of cybersecurity and technology for Defense chief information officer Teri Takai.
Prieto, previously a vice president for IBM’s public sector global business services, was recruited to increase participation in an exchange of cyber incident reports among willing defense industrial base firms and the government, Pentagon officials said.
“Prieto will be charged with improving and growing the voluntary information sharing program between the government and the private sector DIB companies, which is designed to improve DIB network defenses and helps DIB companies and the government to reduce damage to critical programs when defense information is compromised,” Defense spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said.
The two-pronged effort involves the dissemination of contractor breach reports — stripped of identifying information — among all participants, as well as a component that discloses highly-classified intelligence on malware discovered by the National Security Agency. The idea is that cleared contractors or their cleared Internet providers can feed the threat indicators into anti-virus programs to preempt attacks.
Leave a Reply