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13 April 2015

Pentagon Says It Is Moving to Protect Its Cyber Flanks

APRIL 9, 2015

Officials in charge of buying guns and butter for the Department of Defense have decided — only seven years after Chinese hackersinfiltrated the F-35 program — that it’s about time to make cybersecurity a core requirement for all weapons systems.

The move comes as part of a larger push to reform an infamously sluggish, bureaucratic, and often error-prone acquisition system that has become the marketplace for a dwindling number of huge defense contractors.

“Cybersecurity should be a requirement, period, in all our programs,” the department’s chief weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, said on April 9 when rolling out his “Better Buying Power 3.0” plan.

The issue of protecting both government and sensitive defense industry networks from hacking is “a pervasive problem for the department,” Kendall said, and is “a source of risk from inception all the way to retirement — this includes the industrial base.” He emphasized that “everything associated with the project is a potential point of attack.”

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