CYBERCOM Leaders Say Partnerships Enhance Cybersecurity Capabilities

The U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force will broaden its partnerships to enhance cybersecurity information sharing.

CYBERCOM has two initiatives to help the CNMF work with its private sector and international partners. The first initiative, dubbed “under advisement,” will allow CNMF members to share threat indicators in unclassified spaces and chat rooms.

The second initiative is the hunt-forward concept, which involves CNMF teams going to an allied nation to actively look for threats on the host nation’s critical networks. Information gathered from hunt-forward operations not only helps the host nation but also the United States and the broader cybersecurity community.

Information from hunt-forward operations is also fed into the under-advisement program, DefenseScoop reported.

Cybercom executives said private sector companies have been eager to support the combatant command’s efforts. Cybercom Executive Director Holly Baroody shared that over 20 industry partners delivered nearly 150 unique malicious cyber activity indicators to Cybercom since 2022 while CNMF Commander William Hartman said U.S. companies were eager to support the Force’s efforts to look for vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s networks.

Cybersecurity leaders have been touting information sharing as a critical element for preventing threats. Speaking at the RSA Conference in late April, Hartman shared that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency provided incident response support to Cybercom when Iranian hackers attempted to hack an election reporting software.

The CISA and the CNMF have been working together to spot and stop foreign cyber intrusion attempts, as recalled by CISA Executive Assistant Director Eric Goldstein.