A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency program that provides tools and capabilities to other agencies has to get speedier so it can push them toward being able to move more quickly themselves, an agency official said Tuesday.
“We have to get faster,” said Richard Grabowski, acting branch chief of service delivery and deputy program manager for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program at CISA. “The way that we collaborated today wasn’t fast enough for the threats of yesterday, and they certainly aren’t going to be fast enough for the threats of tomorrow.”
That means pushing responsible automation of tasks that also can do so at scale, he said, so that experts “can focus more [on] dealing with the novel threats and adoption and tuning of advanced technology, and not hitting alerts every other day.”
Velocity is one of the three core goals for the CDM program, along with unification and data-driven risk management, Grabowski said at the Elastic Federal Cyber Defense Breakfast, produced by FedScoop.
Unification means keeping data out of silos so “we are connecting those deployments in a meaningful way to really stimulate reusable, actionable lessons learned,” Grabowski said. And data-driven risk management means that in the event of a crisis-level event, agencies are able to “see what is happening with timely, accurate, and trustworthy data, so that we are the tool of first response when the things hit the fan.”
One of CDM’s offerings is Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as a Service, a cloud-based platform for threat analytics, incident response and more. Grabowski said there’s a three-year roadmap for expanding and enhancing it, including by ramping up staff and conducting training.