He said that cybersecurity has expanded beyond protecting information technology to safeguarding operational technologies critical to national infrastructure and public trust.
“The nations that lead will not necessarily be those that invent the most extraordinary technologies. They will be the nations that most integrate those technologies into their economies, into their institutions, into their security and ultimately into the national strategy.”
Resilience has become “an instrument of deterrence,” Coker said. “Cyber resilience, economic resilience, supply chain resilience, space resilience and societal resilience all deny an adversary of the strategic effects that they would seek. And a resilient nation is more difficult to coerce; a trusted society is more difficult to divide; and a secure digital infrastructure is more difficult to exploit. In that sense, cybersecurity does not merely support deterrence. It increasingly enables it,” Coker said.
Sandia staff can view Coker’s talk in the Digital Media Library. (Photo by Craig Fritz)