Security News > 2020 > August > Military's Top Cyber Official Defends More Aggressive Stance
The U.S. military's top cyber official is defending the government's shift toward a more aggressive strategy in cyberspace, saying the mission has evolved over the last decade from "a reactive and defensive posture" to keep pace with sophisticated threats.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, says in a piece being published Tuesday by the magazine Foreign Affairs that the military's cyber fighters are increasingly prepared to engage in combat with online adversaries rather than wait to repair networks after they've been penetrated.
"We learned that we cannot afford to wait for cyber attacks to affect our military networks. We learned that defending our military networks requires executing operations outside our military networks. The threat evolved, and we evolved to meet it," wrote Nakasone in a piece co-authored with Michael Sulmeyer, his senior adviser.
Cyber Command, created in 2010 to protect U.S. military networks, was initially more focused on "Securing network perimeters."
In recent years Cyber Command has gone on the offensive, as 68 cyber protection teams "Proactively hunt for adversary malware on our own networks rather than simply waiting for an intrusion to be identified," Nakasone said.