DHS: New cyber threat center is not strictly about cyber

But Suzanne Spaulding, the undersecretary of Homeland Security for the National Protection and Programs directorate, said it's also important that the new interagency team not examine cyber as an island unto itself. The nascent organization, she said, needs to be able to look beyond the ones and zeros, and combine what the IC knows about malware with what it also knows about the rest of the world, including the state and non-state actors who are using it. "I'm looking forward to the day when we can sit down with not just the cyber experts in the intelligence community, but also with the regional experts who can tell us why a given actor is doing what they're doing," she told a Washington conference hosted by the New America Foundation. "What are the gaps for this actor? What else what they might be looking for? If we see activity around a particular target, what might that mean? Part of what I worry about in our cyber effort is that we're always looking under the lamp post, because that's where the light is. So I think there's tremendous value in bringing all of this together."