Tim Starks
Then-National Security Agency Director Gen. Paul Nakasone arrives for a closed-door hearing in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center in 2023. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The United States is falling “increasingly behind” its adversaries in cyberspace, a former Cyber Command and National Security Agency boss said Saturday.
Speaking at the DistrictCon cybersecurity conference in Washington, D.C., retired Gen. Paul Nakasone said that “our adversaries are continuing to be able to broaden the spectrum of what they’re able to do to us.”
Nakasone said incidents like Chinese government-backed breaches of U.S. telecommunications companies and other critical infrastructure — as well as a steady drumbeat of ransomware attacks against U.S. targets — illustrate “the fact that we’re unable to secure our networks, the fact that we’re unable to leverage the software that’s being provided today, the fact that we have adversaries that continue to maintain this capability.”
Nakasone, who led NSA and CYBERCOM from 2018 until early last year and is now founding director of Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, said he fears the threats of the future are only going to get more dangerous.
One example is “we are starting to see the beginnings of the bleed from the non-kinetic to the kinetic for cyber operations,” he said, referring to actual physical damage.
“What’s next is that we are going to see cyberattacks against a series of platforms being able to actually down platforms with ones and zeros,” Nakasone said.
A board member for OpenAI, Nakasone also talked about how artificial intelligence could make cyber offense more potent. Specifically, he mentioned the notion of generative targeting, such as the idea of physical drones choosing their targets powered by AI.
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