National Security is Everyone's Business

April 20th, 2024 | 3:52 AM ET

Can You Ask a Spy Not to Spy? TCB's Cyber Advisory Board Debates

Posted: April 16th, 2017

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws in commercial software or hardware for which developers haven’t devised a patch — have existed since the dawn of the Digital Age, but today, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden said at a meeting of cyber security experts convened by The Cipher Brief, they’re easily discoverable and used by both nation-state actors and malicious hackers.

In the nineties, “it wasn’t really a vulnerability if you didn’t have eight acres of Cray supercomputers in the basement,” Hayden said at The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Advisory Board Meeting.  “We had this concept called NOBUS which meant “nobody but us” could exploit it. It required something only we had, like massive computer power, to exploit it.”

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+

Categorized as:InternationalTagged with:

Related Articles

How Safe Would We Be Without Section 702?

SUBSCRIBER+EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — A provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that has generated controversy around fears of the potential for abuse has proven to be crucial […] More

June 1st, 2023

Search

Close