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Mar 23 2017

Industry leaders to discuss how to innovate NATO-Industry partnerships for a new era of cyber threats at NITEC17


Cybersecurity and telecommunications industry leaders will emphasize innovation in NATO-Industry partnerships in order to stay ahead of rising cyber threats in keynote remarks at NITEC17.

Glen Post, Chief Executive Officer of CenturyLink; Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of CrowdStrike; Mark Anderson, President of Palo Alto Networks; and John Stewart, Senior Vice President and Chief Security and Trust Officer at Cisco, will present their views of the cybersecurity landscape and how new, innovative NATO-industry partnerships can strengthen collective cyber defence.

"Significant cyber issues are impacting critical infrastructure providers and their customers on a global level," said CenturyLink CEO Glen Post. "Innovative private sector leaders such as CenturyLink continue to develop strong partnerships and innovative products to assure the resiliency of our cyber ecosystem."

"For the last 30 years, Western governments have focused a great deal of attention on the potential kinetic impacts posed by cyber-attacks," said CrowdStrike Co-founder and CTO Dmitri Alperovitch. "Our adversaries, however, have learned to appreciate cyber as an information warfare domain first and foremost. Now that we have witnessed how democracy itself can be attacked through cyber-enabled leaks and propaganda, it is more imperative than ever for NATO to develop a strategy for leveraging both public and private resources to raise preparedness in combatting these threats."

"As the world's digital infrastructure becomes increasingly interconnected, it has become clear that cybersecurity is an inherently distributed challenge that can only be addressed through collaborations that blur traditional boundaries—including borders between nation states and barriers between the public and private sectors," said Palo Alto Networks President Mark Anderson. "This keynote address will argue that true integration across the cybersecurity ecosystem—by embracing concepts such as automated information sharing, technology orchestration, and the type of partnerships led by NATO —is the critical catalyst required to prevent cyber attacks. This collaboration will also reverse the current unsustainable dynamic in cyberspace, where increasingly automated adversaries are dramatically outpacing manual network defence."

"We are at a crucial time, where NATO and industry success will be defined by how closely we work together," said John N Stewart, Cisco Senior Vice President and Chief Security and Trust Officer. "We must be better – requiring security and trust in products purchased just as much as security and trust in products built. We will be remembered on how well we improved our collective ability to quickly detect and respond to cyber threats."

Industry leaders to discuss how to innovate NATO-Industry partnerships for a new era of cyber threats at NITEC17

Other notable speakers include Hugh Thompson, Chief Technology Officer of Symantec, and Michael Brown (US Navy, Retired) Vice President and General Manager, Global Public Sector, RSA.

In addition, Tony Cole, Vice President and Global Government Chief Technology Officer for FireEye, will hold an interactive presentation of FireEye's M-Trends 2017 Report on the current cyber threat landscape on the opening day of the conference. The presentation will consider some of the incidents investigated last year and the global perspective of cyber threat trends as well as a regional perspective around attack trends and defensive and emerging trends for the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific.

The NCI Agency Annual Conference and AFCEA TechNet International (NITEC17) will take place from 24-26 April in Ottawa, Canada, with the theme of "Sharpening NATO's Technological Edge: Adaptive Partnerships and the Innovative Power of Alliance Industry."

To register and view the full agenda, please visit www.nitec.nato.int.