Staying Ahead of the Curve

Diane Miller, director of operations for Northrop Grumman’s cybersecurity group, said Thursday defending data will only get more difficult with time. She was speaking on the CyberPatriot panel at AFA’s CyberFutures Conference. Part of the effort with AFA’s CyberPatriot, a high school cyber defense competition, and with educating youth who wish to work in the cyber realm should be to instill the concept of building “resiliency” into applications and tools, so that they can survive when compromised or under attack, she said. Natalie Granado, cyber training expert at the University of Texas in San Antonio, said training courses she participated in just a few years ago had to create potential future network threats. Today, there’s no need to imagine, as the courses use real-world problems and threats of almost every stripe. If industry, academia, and other sectors do not step up to help close the US education gap in math, sciences, and engineering, then the nation will face some serious cyber scenarios, for which it will not have as many options to solve, as a lot of possible innovation will go untapped, said Duke Ayers of SAIC.