Curtiss-Wright’s Steve Edwards, David Sheets Talk Evolving Gov’t Cybersecurity Needs

Professionals from Curtiss-Wright’s defense solutions unit have said the government must be aware that cyber attacks will continue to evolve despite improvements in technology, Military and Aerospace Electronics reported Wednesday.

David Sheets, a security architect at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, said agencies should shift their cybersecurity requirements from hardening infrastructure to monitoring technologies throughout the product lifecycle.

“Old attacks are continually being employed against new systems, so you can’t forget about those, and new attacks are being developed all the time,” he said. “Industry overall is becoming a lot more aware the problem and putting more effort into addressing it. In the next few years, we should be seeing a lot better capabilities than in previous systems.”

Steve Edwards, director of secure embedded solutions at the defense business unit, noted that the state of current technology makes it easy for malicious actors to pull off less sophisticated attacks. He added that while government and supply chain-level vendors will continue improving cybersecurity techniques, attacks will become more complex in the future.

“These systems are complicated, so to do foolproof testing on every line of code or processor is probably impossible,” he said. “So while capabilities will continue to advance, it will never be foolproof.”