Morgan Adamski is the chief of NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center and is responsible for leading complex and groundbreaking initiatives for NSA cybersecurity, specifically focused on co-creating cybersecurity tradecraft through collaborations with industry to change the way we secure the nation. With new threats consistently igniting, NSA stood up the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center in late 2020, and in just its first year the center grew its partner base from less than 10 to more than 100. In 2021 the Center disclosed a number of vulnerabilities and, through the Enduring Security Framework, NSA and CISA worked across sectors to explore threats to 5G security. Through the Protective Domain Name System (PDNS) pilot, the Center has processed more than 3.8B queries and blocked more than 6.5M malicious domains, including known Russian spear-phishing, botnets, and malware. To date, the Center has provided PDNS services to 40 Defense Industrial Base contractors, and expects to scale to hundreds more in the coming year. As commercial products are increasingly relied on to secure National Security Systems (NSS), through the National Information Assurance Program (NIAP) the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center certified 91 commercial components for use in protecting NSS and published 14 Protection Profiles to raise security in those products.
As the deputy strategic mission manager, Adamski led NSA cybersecurity efforts to build bi-directional analytical relationships with private-sector partners providing cybersecurity services to the Defense Industrial Base. Adamski has been at the forefront of NSA’s computer network defense, computer network exploitation, and cyber analysis missions for more than a decade. She holds a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from Mercyhurst University and a bachelor’s degree in peace, war, and defense with a specialization in national security from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In the past year, through sharing actionable, contextualized threat intelligence derived from NSA’s foreign signals intelligence mission, thousands of analytic exchanges between the Collaboration Center and industry partners on known foreign actors helped identify and prioritize critical threats. The insights shared by NSA enable partners to detect adversary targeting of their infrastructure and mitigate the activity to protect their networks and customers. “We only see part of the picture. We see something in SIGINT, our partners see activity on their networks,” Adamski said. “The only way to mitigate the threat is to communicate and collaborate in real-time to drive outcomes.”