Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, said addressing global threats from China and Russia and protecting critical systems and infrastructure from cyber threats are among the leading priorities of his two organizations.
The 2023 Wash100 awardee shared during a conference in Washington that in the future he intends to focus on the competition with China, the need for persistent public-private partnerships and the development of the next-generation workforce, NSA said Thursday.
According to Nakasone, cybersecurity has become a national security issue due to the prevalence of different threat vectors over the past years.
“But what have we seen since 2018? We’ve seen supply chain, we’ve seen zero days, we’ve seen ransomware, we’ve seen a number of different actors that have changed and really provided an inflection point for all of us to say, ‘Hey, this is a national security issue, and we’ve got to treat it differently,'” Nakasone said.