NCDI Financial Industry Workshop

National Cyber Defense Industry Workshop

The National Cyber Defense Industry Workshop will take place on October 28-29, 2009 at the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, DC. The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and will be limited to senior experts from the financial services industry, academia and government agencies. The workshop is one in a series organized by the National Cyber Defense Initiative Steering committee with support from several government organizations and leaders.

Background

Large portions of our country's economic, industrial, social and governmental functions now depend upon a cyber infrastructure assembled from readily available commercial information system components. Much of this infrastructure is organized to tolerate random failures and outages but could fail catastrophically under malicious attack. Industry leadership is needed to substantially reduce this serious vulnerability. The goal of the workshop is to develop a shared view of an attack-resistant and attack-tolerant cyber infrastructure and specific steps to be taken to reach that vision. Specifically, we seek to:

  1. Understand the changing threat environment and the increasing possibility of extraordinary attacks mounted by nation-state adversaries for strategic gain and the growing sophistication of criminal organizations for financial gain.
  2. Review Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council Research and Development priorities and National Cyber Leap Year priorities. Discuss research that support these priorities and specific game-changing technologies and processes that apply to the banking and finance sector
  3. Discuss ways to incorporate new innovation partnership models. Create processes whereby the banking and finance sector and the broader research community and the U.S. Government can produce relevant solutions to current and long-term challenges and plan for a more efficient transfer of these research products into industry best practices.
  4. Produce a public report and plan to help inform government of needed R&D to defend the financial services infrastructure. (Background resource: http://ncdi.nps.edu/)
We are inviting key financial industry, government and academic partners. Industry participants will include representatives from major financial institutions that represent all of the major sectors of the US financial infrastructure. We expect participants will have deep understanding of the technologies involved in operating the financial infrastructure and the top R&D priorities (see https://www.fsscc.org/fsscc/reports/2008/RD_Agenda-FINAL.pdf). There are many efforts underway to begin to address these issues at the national level. We will have representatives from the leading commissions and working groups participating in the workshop. This workshop will be a forum for members of the financial industry to contribute input to multiple planning and strategic efforts underway and to define actionable plans to take back to their organizations.