How Do You Rebuild Systems That Can't Go Offline? with Peraton's Tom Afferton

Tom Afferton [00:00:00]: If you're introducing security controls or a maintenance activity or modernization that interrupts that operation, then you're no better off than if there was a cyber interruption.   Frank Cilluffo [00:00:16]: Welcome to Cyber Focus from the McCrary Institute, where we explore the people and ideas shaping and defending our digital world. I'm your host, Frank Cilluffo, and this week I have the privilege to sit down with Tom Afferton. Tom is president of the Cyber and Intelligence Service at Peraton, where he oversees a number of the most mission-critical entities inside the US government and has been there for a number of years. Prior to that, he also was at AT&T and many years at Northrop Grumman. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today.   Tom Afferton [00:00:50]: Happy to be here.   Frank Cilluffo [00:00:50]: So I thought I'd start at the beginning, and a lot of your clients are mission-critical.   Tom Afferton [00:00:57]: Yes.   Frank Cilluffo [00:00:57]: And very different than a traditional IT enterprise. And I'd be curious what that looks like. Why is that different and what your initial thoughts are there?   Tom Afferton [00:01:07]: So when we look at a lot of the systems services that we protect, you have to think about the consequences of them not operating. When we think about, you know, a large-scale modernization as well, right, you have to think about the whole point of, of cybersecurity is to protect that institution, to protect its operability. So if you're introducing security controls or a maintenance activity or modernization that interrupts that operation, then you're no better off than if there was a cyber interruption, right? And so when we go through, again, thinking about something like a modernization, we take an approach we call sort of a layered uplift, which is you introduce that new capability in an incremental way. You make sure that it's instrumented so that as you introduce it, you're monitoring, is it doing what you expected it to do? And then over time, it takes on more responsibilities. And then ultimately, you can turn off the legacy environment. Now, there's of course prioritization involved, deciding, you know, where are you going to start? Where are you going to build in that resilience and redundancy? Something that Nick Andersen over at CISA has introduced, the term of ruthless prioritization.   Frank Cilluffo [00:02:37]: Mm-hmm.   Tom Afferton [00:02:38]: And I think that's helpful. It's helpful when thinking about resilience planning. It's helpful when thinking about planning resources up front, coordination, but it's then also helpful in thinking about incident response. And when I've heard him speak and he's explained it, what he's talking about is going beyond just prioritizing a category of critical infrastructure. It's understanding that, you know, the key mission, the crown jewel that we need to have keep operating, we need to understand the assets associated with it.   Frank Cilluffo [00:03:13]: Mm-hmm.   Tom Afferton [00:03:14]: So what GPU is that workload or that workflow operating in what cluster and what data centers powered by what part of the grid? And knowing that sort of connection between the critical infrastructure and the mission and the physical and the technical infrastructure allows you to then prioritize.   Frank Cilluffo [00:03:32]: Because you really can't pause operations during an upgrade, right?   Tom Afferton [00:03:36]: Absolutely.   Frank Cilluffo [00:03:37]: So it's a challenge. These are— because you're also behind a number of critical systems that most Americans don't think about every day.   Tom Afferton [00:03:44]: That's right.   Frank Cilluffo [00:03:45]: One in particular that's gotten a little bit of news, and I know we can't get into great detail here, is FAA and the modernization.   Tom Afferton [00:03:51]: Yeah. And that's an interesting one. Peraton's very proud to be part of that. The administration has framed tha