Shibilski said NRO leadership created the CPO because operations and security policies had long been managed separately, leaving openings for adversaries. “Threats do not respect organizational boundaries,” he said. “Adversaries look for seams; they look for gaps between policy and operations, between responsibility and execution, and between one team and another.” Leadership concluded that a fundamental change in how the agency organizes for cyber protection was needed, prompting the integration of cyber operations and security functions into a single office under the principle of “one team, one mission, and one standard.”<\/p>\n
The consolidation was important, Shibilski said, “because when our warfighters and partners need support, guidance, or a decision, they should not have to navigate organizational seams.” He described the CPO as a round-the-clock mission organization staffed by military personnel, civilian government employees, and contractors working side by side. Alongside the Space Force’s Delta 26 unit, which Shibilski commands, the team includes personnel from the Air Force, Army, and Navy, as well as engineers, acquirers, IT specialists, and intelligence professionals.<\/p>\n
The office provides more than 38 cyber services, including continuous cyber defense, incident response, security engineering, risk management, and mission support. Over the past year, as the tempo of operations in the Middle East and elsewhere increased, the CPO expanded its operational cyber support to combatant commands around the world. Prioritized IT and cyber assets from the combatant commands will gradually be onboarded for centralized protection. The office is also extending its ability to monitor Department of Defense networks, including legacy systems such as Operational Technology. “We are expanding cyber visibility across mission environments,” Shibilski said. “That includes improving how we bring operationally relevant data into enterprise defense workflows, so we can detect, understand, and respond more effectively.”<\/p>\n
In a separate keynote fireside chat, William Loucks, senior director for Intelligence at the Office of the National Cyber Director, told the audience of space and satellite executives, cyber engineers, and Space Force officers that the federal government and the country must urgently improve their cyber posture. He warned that the acceleration in the speed and scale of cyber attacks likely to follow widespread adoption of AI by threat actors makes the traditional cadence of cyber defense no longer viable. “Historically, we relied on observing threat activity in the wild, gathering static indicators of compromise, folding signature-based detections into defensive resources, and hoping that the threat is mitigated,” Loucks said.<\/p>\n
The integration of operations and security into a single office matters, in Shibilski’s account, because it removes the organizational seams that adversaries exploit and gives warfighters and partners a single point for support and decisions. Loucks argued that reactive cybersecurity is now inadequate. “A strictly reactive approach to cybersecurity is inadequate, and that’s especially true today because the threats we face now are distinctly different from the threats we faced only a few years ago,” he said.<\/p>\n
The CPO plans to gradually onboard prioritized IT and cyber assets from the combatant commands for centralized protection and to continue expanding cyber visibility across mission environments, including legacy Operational Technology systems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shibilski said NRO leadership created the CPO because operations and security policies had long been managed separately, leaving openings for adversaries. “Threats do not respect organizational boundaries,” he said. “Adversaries look for seams; they look for gaps between policy and operations, between responsibility and execution, and between one team and another.” Leadership concluded that a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91697,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91725,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91696\/revisions\/91725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}