The notice to Congress repurposing of $100 million to go towards testing and evaluating cyber vulnerabilities in weapon systems, sent from the Defense Department comptroller’s office is described by many as a good first step toward better security. One top DoD official described this as potentially the first step toward building harder and more secure systems in the future.
“The reason why I was calling attention to this and why I think this is so important is as we start to take a look at these weapons systems and understand to what extent they are vulnerable and laying out mitigation strategies, there’s a net benefit that this content and knowledge will float forward in the future designs and developments of the next generation systems, which will be inherently more hard from a cyber vantage point than they are today,” Richard Pino, acting deputy assistant secretary for Defense for C3, Cyber and Business Systems, said during a keynote presentation at an AFCEA NOVA event September 1.