Anonymous

“ As we talked about during a press event a number of weeks ago, we cannot defend a network if we can’t see a network. And in our review of what caused SolarWinds, we saw significant gaps in modernization and in technology of cybersecurity across the federal government.
So we will be rolling out technology to address the specific gaps we identified, beginning with the nine compromised agencies. We want to make the federal government a leader, not a laggard, in cybersecurity. ”

“ And what we want to do is move to best-of-breed commercial technology and take advantage of the innovation of our private sector. I think we don’t even need to build something new from the ground up when we think that there is much stronger, innovative technology available that we can move to — including cloud, including security implemented in the cloud, zero-based principles, and other related areas.So that’s our plan right now. ”

“ We’re on a tight timeline to move there, as I said, (inaudible) beginning with the compromised agencies, as well as addressing, in the upcoming executive action, some of the foundational areas that we think will help the federal government use procurement to be a leader in this space, and, really, in meeting in this space, address both private-sector and government challenges in finding, buying, and using innovative, usable, and secure software and hardware — and systems, to your point.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: All right, everyone. That has to be our last question. We have a hard stop. ”

“ It instead represents a desire to address our cybersecurity issues while fully protecting the civil liberties and privacy of Americans. So if we can find — and building a deeper partnership with the private sector, which is foundational to effective cybersecurity.
So it really comes from saying our goals are: building a tight partnership with the private sector. They have the information. There’s less concerns of civil liberty and privacy when it’s private sector versus government, as we know from other discussions on social media privacy, for example. ”

“ Under the authority under which the Unified Coordination Group is stood up, it allows for private-sector participation. For the first time, we’ve invited private-sector companies to participate in the Unified Coordination Group because we still believe that public-private partnership is foundational in cybersecurity, and we want to ensure we’re taking every opportunity to include key private sector participants early and directly in our remediation efforts. ”

“ As you all know, when any critical patch is released, criminal actors immediately begin to reverse-engineer it so they can exploit the underlying vulnerabilities. We’re always in that race. Once they do, they’ll able to copy the attack to deploy ransomware and other potential disruptive attacks on an unpatched server. ”

“ Yes, they appear to be sophisticated and capable. But they took advantages of weaknesses that were in that software from its creation. As we talked about a moment ago, insecure software and hardware is a key challenge we face. ”