On August 7, Jason Healey gave a major talk at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas titled, “Is Defense Winning?” His talk looks at what “winning” means for cyber defenders and provides a framework for understanding if any system-wide advantage is shifting from offense to defense. As you may remember, SIPA’s first New York Cyber Task Force, which Healey ran, looked at how the Internet could be made more defensible, ideas which were directly picked up by the White House for the National Cybersecurity Strategy. This talk looks at indicators – often using already available information – to assess progress across the categories of threat, vulnerability, and impact. You can read more on the Black Hat website here. 

Black Hat is one of the most-select conferences for cybersecurity, so there have been some articles and podcasts out on his talk:

 – Article with Dark Reading: “Is Defense Winning? A Look at Decades of Playing Catch-up” (linked here) – Podcast with ITSP Magazine: “Is Defense Winning? | A Black Hat USA 2024 Conversation with Jason Healey” (linked here)