In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Gen. Timothy Howe, director of the National Security Agency and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, said the second biggest weakness in cyber attacks is that “China has been very aggressive in using their own industries to find vulnerabilities, keep them secret and target them.”
“You say the U.S. is helping build resilience, but where are the weakest links? Where do they need help?” Bloomberg correspondent and host Haslinda Amin asked.
Howe responded: “One of the ways we think about it is when countries ask us for help. So at U.S. Cyber Command, we have a series of operations we call Defend Forward. When requested, we send in teams of experts. We work side by side, doing a variety of things together. One of them is identifying networks that are of concern, identifying if they have vulnerabilities, identifying if there are attempts to hack that infrastructure, and blocking that. And another time, we expose that activity, because it helps other countries learn from it. So, first and foremost, the biggest threat is; [is] “One is vulnerabilities in networks and the ability of people to plug their own vulnerabilities. The second is that China has been very aggressive in using its industry to find vulnerabilities, keep them secret and target them. That’s why we’re working quickly with a number of countries to try to expose, to the best of our ability, the vulnerabilities that exist in our systems and the Chinese actions to exploit them.”
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