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La’Naia Jones: Intelligence Community Aims Cyber Efforts at Hacking Capability Commoditization, Ransomware

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La’Naia Jones, deputy chief information officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has said the intelligence community has started to direct its cybersecurity efforts against the use of ransomware by nation state-related threat actors, expansion of the information technology supply chain exploits and commoditization of breaching capabilities, MeriTalk reported Wednesday.

“These are key areas that we are focusing on and we’re trying to make headway as foundational to the overall cybersecurity and cyber imperative,” Jones said Wednesday at a Splunk-hosted cyber event.

She noted that IC works to investigate nation state-linked adversaries on a daily basis and cited security risks associated with open-source tools.

“Hackers are successfully infecting a wide range of users through official software distribution channels and also obfuscating their intended targets,” Jones said.

Jones said the procurement of services and exploits by cyber threat actors from various vendors on the dark web is an example of the commoditization of hacking capabilities.