On March 19, 2013, Sherri Ramsay, former Director, NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center, spoke as part of the ongoing CyberPoint Speaker Series. Sharing her (unclassified) experiences in government, she described how teamwork can defeat cyber threats. Ramsay has seen cyber criminals, hacktivists, and hostile intelligence services expand their targets and change their goals since the 1990s. The threat is evolving quickly, attacks are continuous, and defenses are playing catch-up. Cybersecurity is difficult for technical, legal, and cultural reasons, and Ramsay advised all of us—private citizens, industry, academia, and government—to cooperate in sharing information, making our networks defensible, and actively defending ourselves. Frameworks like the Twenty Controls can be invaluable. Cybersecurity, she concluded, is a team sport, and effective collaboration is the only winning strategy.
Currently Senior Advisor to CyberPoint's CEO, Sherri Ramsay is the former Director of the NSA/CSS Threat Operations Center (NTOC) where she led discovery and characterization of threats to national security systems, providing situational awareness of those threats, and coordinating actionable information to counter those threats. She is the recipient of many awards for her service to the Intelligence Community.
This event in CyberPoint's Speaker Series was made possible in part by the generous support of BW Tech at UMBC Cyber Incubator, the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore and the Harbor East Development Group.