ANDn electronic warfare it is easier to attack than to defend: it is enough for an attacker to succeed once; a defender must always be successful”, warns Anne Neuberger (from New York and 46 years old). US President Joe Biden has so much confidence in her that in January 2021 he created a new position for her to have access to the Oval Office: National Security Delegate for Cyber and Emerging Technologies. Biden needed someone to coordinate US electronic espionage, weighed down by the bureaucratic labyrinth of agencies that collaborate and often compete with each other: CIA, FBI or the National Security Agency (NSA), attached to the Pentagon, where Neuberger had been climbing from 2009 until becoming director of Cybersecurity. At the operational level, her tasks are similar to those of the Armed Forces Cyber Command in the military field, but focused on federal agencies and industry, as well as relations with allied countries.
In the world of intelligence, she is considered an expert in risk management. “The more brains you put to work on a problem, the more likely you are to solve it. On the other hand, each additional person adds a risk. It is very difficult to find a balance », she explains. But her great ability is to oppose the mainstream without raising her voice. She did it at the NSA, which she helped rescue from the debacle of the clandestine electronic surveillance program scandal. And she before she also did it in her private life. Neuberger defied her own destiny: that of a Jewish girl raised in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood who was only expected to take care of her house and her two children. But the current challenge is the most serious that any US cyber defense official has ever faced. The hackers The Russians, who already interfered in the elections that Trump won in 2016, start with an advantage. In 2020 they managed to infiltrate SolarWinds, a provider of software both from the Administration (Pentagon, State Department, Treasury…) and from the big technology companies, such as Microsoft or Intel. Neuberger was charged with the mission of closing the doors they opened. Now he must make sure that something similar does not happen again.
He revolutionized the NSA and scored a point: that technology companies were less reticent when it came to sharing information with the government
Ultra-Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn
His credentials are surprising. Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, as the protagonist of the series Unorthodox. His mother tongue is Yiddish. And her family calls her Chani. She went to an all-girls school with two thousand other girls, where she studied Torah. She met her husband, Yehuda Neuberger, a lawyer, on a date arranged by her parents. But that she is respectful with her elders does not mean that she is submissive. And Neuberger managed to get out of the Boro Park neighborhood, populated by immigrants of Hungarian origin, based on effort. “My father was proud of my ability. But my mother considered that if the woman works, it is a sign that her husband cannot support her », she recalls. She enrolled at Touro College, where men and women study separately. She worked as a programmer in the family business, a successful investment firm, and attended night classes. She finished two careers: Business and Computer Science. She didn’t settle. Her husband encouraged her and she got into Columbia University while she was pregnant. Her 9/11 attacks made him rethink her priorities. She has a master’s degree in international relations. She studied Arabic and French… «The war in Iraq was going badly. The United States took in my father, who came as a refugee, and I felt indebted.”
All of her grandparents are Auschwitz survivors. But seven of his eight great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. The one who survived jumped from the train that was taking him to the extermination camp. “There was a very deep feeling among my elders that they had to show that Hitler had not succeeded in eradicating our faith,” he says. His father, George Karfunkel, came to the United States in the 1950s. “He is afraid of authority figures, even traffic cops. It is a consequence of having grown up in communist Hungary.” The maternal family had emigrated a few years earlier. George founded an investment company in 1971 and became a millionaire.
Her parents were on the Air France plane that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) hijacked in 1976. They were visiting Israel for the first time and had left Anne, who was a baby, with a grandmother. On the way back they took a flight from Tel Aviv to Paris which was diverted to Uganda. “The hijackers held the Israeli passengers. My parents had a US passport, but since my father was wearing a yarmulke, they decided to keep it too. In Yiddish he told my mother to go away, but she refused.’ The other passengers were released. The kidnappers held the hostages for a week. And they threatened to shoot them if forty Palestinians were not released. But Israeli commandos stormed the plane and rescued them. “My mother lost her shoes in the melee and a soldier gave her sandals when they landed in Israel. My life would have been very different had it not been for that military operation. That is why I understand that sometimes there are threats that only a government, only an army, can solve », she affirms.
When Biden invented a job for her, some questioned his loyalty. Magazine Mother Jones and the NBC channel recalled that the Mossad, Israel’s secret service, also spies on friendly governments.
Reputation back to the NSA
Neuberger had previously worked at the White House as an intern. She went 16 years ago. And from there she jumped to the NSA. When she was recruited by General Keith Alexander, he asked her, “What is her virtue?” And she replied, “People tell me I’m good at solving problems, breaking them down into chunks, and getting a group of people to work together without losing sight of the overall goal.” The most serious problem she faced was the disrepute of the agency. It was 2014 and the scandal uncovered by Edward Snowden was in full swing, revealing that the NSA had a program that spied on the communications of both foreign citizens and millions of Americans. “The NSA functioned as a black box. But intelligence gathering must be guided by democratic values and laws. There are very strict rules that cannot be broken. The appointment of a person in charge of civil liberties and privacy was essential. The addition of him marked a change in the culture of the NSA », she relates. Within the agency, Neuberger was head of risk management and belonged to the founding team of the National Cybersecurity Center, which she came to lead. She was also the friendly face who explained to Americans that they no longer need to fear their own cybersoldiers. She scored another point: that tech companies were less reticent about sharing information with the government and federal agencies.
His advice: “Passwords are dead, use two-factor authentication. And keep an offline backup of your bank data…»
He worked from morning to night, thirteen hours a day, but on Fridays he left the Maryland headquarters early to get home before sabbath. He is now more flexible with the Jewish tradition of resting on the Sabbath because his schedule is hectic. He has worked with the Ukrainian intelligence. He traveled to Brussels to coordinate the response of NATO countries and to Warsaw to meet with those responsible for cybersecurity from B9, as the countries on the eastern flank of the Alliance are known. At the national level, it has reinforced the protection of critical infrastructures (health, financial, airports…), instructing dozens of companies, with special attention to drinking water networks and oil pipelines, so that sabotage such as that of Colonial, in May, which left hundreds of gas stations without fuel. Tech companies are also preparing. Google intends to shield the security of its cloud and, for this, it has acquired the cybersecurity firm Mandiant for almost five billion euros. Neuberger also asks the population to take extreme precautions: «There are three actions that will save your data. One is to apply security patches quickly. The second is to use two-step authentication. Passwords are dead; they must be very long to withstand brute force attacks. And the third is to keep a backup copy without an Internet connection of the access data to the bank, health records…».
The great enemy is the GRU, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, although this country has been subcontracting to hackers They operate with some autonomy. For this reason, the United States offers up to ten million dollars in reward for the identification of anyone who participates in malicious activities financed by the Russian state. China has also adopted the tactic of tasking criminal groups with some missions, especially since it reorganized its cyber operations in 2015 and transferred much control of the People’s Liberation Army to the MSS, a state security service that, over time, it has become increasingly aggressive and bold. Neuberger also keeps an eye out for friendly hackers waging war on their own, like Anonymous, who can wreak havoc. “He We are concerned that they will perform disruptive communications attacks because the backlash may lead to an escalation.”
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.