The Pentagon is considering an adversarial process that will allow the Department of Defense to challenge the cyber security of its contractors, confirmed Kevin Fahey, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition. Fahey described a scenario in which a “red team” playing the role of hackers tests vulnerabilities and tries to penetrate the contractors’ systems, to identify weaknesses.
America’s defense industrial base has been raided over the last few years, a key danger for the Defense Department. Eric Chewning, the head of the Pentagon’s industrial policy office, noted that that data breaches from defense contractors has been an issue for some time, noting “It’s not just on the classified space, but it’s also on the sensitive unclassified information as well that’s important to us.”