As federal agencies and U.S. industry bolster their cybersecurity defenses, foreign intelligence agencies are likely to ramp up their targeting of trusted insiders, according to the director of the National Insider Threat Task Force.
Bob Rohrer, who has led the task force since January, said the successful implementation of zero trust architectures and other least-privilege principles could make it harder for foreign spies to pilfer U.S. secrets by exploiting gaps in network defenses. President Joe Biden has directed agencies to adopt zero trust architectures as part of his May cyber executive order.
“In the long run, from my experience, an intelligent adversarial threat that’s very capable of moving across those threat vectors, you harden the attack surface, it just means that if they still want your information, or they still want to go after your resources, then maybe they have to go after your humans a little bit harder,” Rohrer said in an interview with Federal News Network. “As we go forward, I think it’s just as important to keep the insider threat…
