Cyber Ops Resources Revealed?

This post was written by Jill R. Aitoro.

Try to find out how much federal government spends on cybersecurity per year and you likely won't get a straight answer. The typical explanation is this: Cybersecurity spending is spread across a variety of federal agencies and funding pulled from a number of different categories of appropriations.

Nothing makes that more clear than the investigative report on the intelligence community released Monday by the Washington Post. The Post defined "Cyber Operations" as the following:

Offensive and defensive cyber (or digital) warfare, including the fields of computer network attack, computer network exploitation and computer network defense; as well as traditional electronic warfare (e.g. jamming) intended to deny an adversary use of their electronically dependent equipment through "non-kinetic" means -- that is, by fighting with electrons rather than explosives.

According to the report, 22 intelligence and Defense organizations have anywhere from two to 113 locations that participate in cyber operations in some capacity. Those same organizations employ between 11 and 484 companies to support their cyber efforts.

This describes cyber operations for the intelligence and Defense community only. The Homeland Security Department and other civilian agencies, which are not accounted for in this particular report, would push those numbers far higher.

Is this a bad thing? Hard to say. As the Post report notes, so much about what the intelligence community does specifically is kept confidential, so determining whether their cybersecurity operations are effectively managed is all but impossible. It does make one wonder, however, whether there is a more practical way to fight this battle.

The Washington Post report spurred quite a response from the intelligence community. You can read some of their rebuttals at the ODNI Web site.