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 Alexander told Reuters he took the step to head off additional
controversy about IronNet Cybersecurity, a startup he announced
after leaving the NSA last year.
"We think it's a good idea that the government review them,"
Alexander said in an interview ahead of an appearance at the RSA
Conference on cyber security in San Francisco.
Alexander said his company had already applied for some patents,
which should eventually become public record.
The patent issue has drawn questions from security experts and
ethicists who wondered if Alexander would be profiting from the
labors of others at the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, which he had
also headed. Alexander previously dropped a plan to have an NSA
employee work part-time at the startup.
Alexander said that the core ideas in the patents were brought to
him by another employee who developed them in the private sector. An
NSA spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
On other matters, Alexander said that the U.S. government needed to
do more on cyber security defense and should have done more in the
past.
He also said that he was seeing an increased blending of
state-sponsored and criminal cyber attacks. As one example, he cited
websites associated with the breaches of Home Depot Inc and Target
Corp that contained hostile references to U.S. foreign policy.
"There are tremendous concerns" that those sites "show a much closer
relationship with state objectives," Alexander said.
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Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian cooperation with Western law
enforcement has grown even more rare, and the United States has
taken to publicly indicting some residents it is unlikely to
capture.
Corruption is one problem, and another is that intelligence agencies
in Russia, like those in the America, want to put those with
computer hacking skills to work on other objectives.
If relations worsen with Russia or China, that analysis suggests the
potential for major breaches originating in those countries will
rise, he said.
Alexander also said he was concerned that if talks with Iran fail to
produce a nuclear agreement by a June 30 deadline, the country will
return to direct attacks like those it was accused of launching on
U.S. banking websites in 2011 and 2012.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Alan Crosby)
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