NSA released the first video of its new Cybersecurity Collaboration Center speaker series. In these talks, NSA experts will share insights, lessons, and contributions of their cybersecurity work. The Center works with government and industry partners to protect U.S. National Security Systems, the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB).

In this first video, the Deputy Chief Operations Officer for NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, United States Navy Lieutenant Zachary Dannelly sat down with Dr. Josiah Dykstra, Cybersecurity Collaboration Center technical fellow, to talk about his experiences in the past year co-piloting Protective Domain Name System (PDNS) as a service with the Department of Defense Data Crime Center (DC3) and partners from the Defense Industrial Base. Additionally, Dannelly spoke about the motivation for the pilot, lessons learned, and insights for those who may adopt this technology in the future.

The PDNS Pilot examined over 4 billion DNS queries to and from participating networks, flagged more than 3,500 malicious domains, and blocked more than 13 million suspicious connections. By leveraging information created by PDNS logs, Lt. Dannelly and his team were able to locate and eliminate malware in both company networks and employee devices. While there are many layers to cybersecurity, PDNS has proven through this pilot to be a low cost and scalable solution network defenders can add to their toolboxes.

The cybersecurity collaboration center augments and amplifies NSA’s ability to prevent and eradicate threats to NSS, DoD, and the DIB through our industry partnerships. The center combines partner insights with NSA intelligence to detect adversary activity, creates innovative new tradecraft to discover and track adversaries, and mitigates threats through the development and sharing of mitigation guidance to inform the NSS, DoD, and the DIB’s ability to prevent and eradicate threats.

View the video on our Youtube channel and learn more about PDNS in NSA’s recent release, “Selecting a Protective DNS Service.”