Anne Neuberger, a longtime National Security Agency official and the daughter of two of the hostages held at Entebbe Airport in 1976, has been named the head of the agency’s new Cybersecurity Directorate.
Neuberger previously helped to create U.S. Cyber Command, where she was chief risk officer, and oversaw the agency’s election security work in the 2018 midterm elections, the Times of Israel reports.
“Threats from those that want to cause us harm are real and not going away,” she said in an interview with Forward. “We have a commitment to defending our nation in lawful ways. Our nation needs to remain vigilant when it comes to cybersecurity. The NSA makes critical contributions to protect the nation.”
Neuberger said her family has a history of near-death experiences, with ancestors who survived the Holocaust, as well as her parents’ experience as passengers on the Air France flight that was hijacked in Uganda by a group of radical Palestinian nationalists. Her parents were not Israeli, but were held as hostages for a week because they were Orthodox Jewish.
“My parents had American passports, but because my father wore a kippah they knew he was Jewish and decided to keep him, too,” she told Forward. “A military operation brought my parents home. Sometimes that’s the only option.”
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