Pentagon Says NSA Working With Big Companies on Cyber Information Sharing

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The National Security Agency (NSA) is working with big defense industrial base companies on information sharing on cyber issues, Defense Department Acting Chief Information Officer Kelly Fletcher said during an interview at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit on Thursday.

"To talk a little bit about what NSA is doing, I think it’s very cool. They’re focused on big defense industrial base companies, and when they say they’re a collaboration center, they are a collaboration center. They are really trying to say ‘Hey, we have some exquisite information.’ It’s the NSA. But also these commercial entities, these big companies, they have some pretty unique and interesting information. So we’re working to collaborate, sort of for the common good," Fletcher said.

The US government’s pivot to a so-called "zero trust" cyber architecture - which assumes all devices in a network to be untrustworthy by default - will require the support of industry partners as well as the Defense Department, Fletcher added.

In May, President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order to improve information sharing between the US government and private industry partners on cyber issues. The order also provided for an implementation of stronger cybersecurity standards in the federal government by securing cloud services and developing a zero-trust architecture.