In a change for the Agency, the new directorate will have a defensive focus…

An article review.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a cat and mouse game between hackers and the good guys: from potential foreign influence in elections to the establishment of the US “Cyber Command” and, of course, the steady announcement of data breaches…So it should come as no surprise that the National Security Agency is now reportedly organizing its own cybersecurity division, called the Cybersecurity Directorate.

While the NSA has always been involved in the nation’s cybersecurity it has typically played a more offensive role, helping in the development of tools such as the Stuxnet worm which disabled Iranian nuclear centrifuges, for example. The Cybersecurity Directorate differs by being focused more on the defense of the United States’ electronic assets, primarily through information gathering and sharing operations.

Together with the other agencies involved in cyber threat sharing, including the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, the Cybersecurity Directorate will hopefully improve the dissemination of security threats to both public and private institutions—and has already made steps to do so, through sharing new malware samples with sites such as VirusTotal. While we don’t yet know how the growing number of cybersecurity related government organizations will interoperate, this new directorate should add some much needed resources to the fight…and that’s never a bad thing.

Original article by Catalin Cimpanu writing for ZDNet.