Showing posts with label Rob Joyce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rob Joyce. Show all posts

Rob Joyce | NSA TAO Chief on Disrupting Nation State Hackers | USENIX Enigma Conference 2016

Source: USENIX Enigma Conference youtube



Rob Joyce, Chief, Tailored Access Operations, National Security Agency

From his role as the Chief of NSA's Tailored Access Operation, home of the hackers at NSA, Mr. Joyce will talk about the security practices and capabilities that most effectively frustrate people seeking to exploit networks.

IT WAS THE talk most anticipated at this year’s inaugural Usenix Enigma security conference in San Francisco and one that even the other speakers were eager to hear.

Rob Joyce, the nation’s hacker-in-chief, took up the ironic task of telling a roomful of computer security professionals and academics how to keep people like him and his elite corps out of their systems.

Joyce is head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations—the government’s top hacking team who are responsible for breaking into the systems of its foreign adversaries, and occasionally its allies. He’s been with the NSA for more than 25 years but only became head of the TAO division in April 2013, just weeks before the first leaks from Edward Snowden were published by the Guardian and Washington Post.

Joyce acknowledged that it was “very strange” for someone in his position to stand onstage before an audience. The TAO has largely existed in the shadowy recesses of the NSA—known and unknown at the same time—until only recently when documents leaked by Snowden and others exposed the workings of this cabal as well as many of its sophisticated hacking tools.

Joyce himself did little to shine a light on the TAO’s classified operations. His talk was mostly a compendium of best security practices. But he did drop a few of the not-so-secret secrets of the NSA’s success, with many people responding to his comments on Twitter.
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