The United States and Israel will be working much closer together in the realm of cybersecurity, senior officials from both nations announced during a conference in Tel Aviv this week.
Speaking on Monday at the Cyber Week 2017 conference, President Donald Trump’s assistant for Homeland Security and Counter-terrorism, Thomas Bossert, described the newly formed “Israeli US bilateral cyber working group,” which will work to secure critical infrastructure.
The group, headed by US White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce, will begin working next week and include representatives from both governments, the Times of Israel reported.
“The meetings this week will focus on a range of cyber issues — critical infrastructure, advanced R&D, international cooperation, and workforce,” said Bossert, elaborating that the team would be “focused on finding and stopping cyber adversaries before they enter networks, before they reach critical infrastructure and identifying ways to hold bad actors accountable. We believe the agility Israel has in developing solutions will resolve in innovative cyber defenses that we can test here and take back to America.”
Cybersecurity is the “biggest strategic challenges since 9/11,” he added. “Nations have the ability to steal sensitive information and data and destroy systems and the trend is heading in the wrong direction.”
Also addressing the conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel faces dozens of cyberattacks a month.
On Tuesday Israel also unveiled another technologically oriented security initiative. The Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency, announced that it was establishing a new technical innovation fund in which it would offer equity free investments in exchange for “a license to use the technology developed, without imposing any restrictions on the IP developed, and without paying royalties.”
The agency stated that it was interested in robotics, data encryption, personality profiling software and machine learning.