Advertisement

CISA to formally solicit industry feedback on cybersecurity incident reporting rules

CISA Director Jen Easterly will meet with executives to craft a framework for cybersecurity incident reporting that doesn't "burden industry."
Jen Easterly (L), Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Chris Inglis, the National Cyber Director, testify during their confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on June 10, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Federal cyber officials will formally ask industry leaders “in the next couple of days” to help shape the regulatory structure for cybersecurity incident reporting, Jen Easterly, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Wednesday.

The incident reporting framework follows the new law that President Biden signed in March requiring that critical infrastructure owners and operators to report major cyberattacks to CISA within 72 hours and ransomware attacks within 24 hours.

CISA has said that it will use the reports to rapidly deploy resources to victims under attack and share information with network defenders. Easterly, who spent four years working on cyber defense at Morgan Stanley prior to coming to CISA, emphasized that she wants to work with industry to create a smart regulatory apparatus that doesn’t create problems for the private sector.

“This will finally allow us a much better understanding what’s going on across the ecosystem,” Easterly said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington. “We don’t want to burden industry and we don’t want to burden the federal government with noise either.”

Advertisement

Easterly said that after CISA issues a request for information from the private sector, she intends to also host several listening sessions with industry to ensure the rule-making process is “consultative.”

Throughout the interview at Billington, Easterly emphasized that while offensive cybersecurity is “sexy,” she wants cyber defenders to understand that “defense is the new offense.”

“We don’t want to burden industry and we don’t want to burden the federal government with noise either.”

jen easterly, cisa

“There’s amazing, amazing talent out there in the defense community, and we need to harness that to make sure that we are building and defending a secure and resilient ecosystem to make adversaries’ jobs much harder,” Easterly said. “This is the thing — attackers have budgets, too. We have to work together to make sure that we are increasing the marginal cost of their investment.”

U.S. cybersecurity practitioners can compete with anyone on the basis of skills alone, Easterly said. But she cautioned that America may sometimes come in behind adversaries because of ethics.

Advertisement

“They go after schools, they go after hospitals, they go after emergency services, they go after water,” Easterly said, lamenting what she called an “asymmetry in morality” between U.S. cyber operators and enemies.

Easterly was followed to the stage at Billington by National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, who told the audience that the “sense of urgency continues to go up on a daily basis.”

“Defense needs to be the new offense: We need to establish the initiative. That’s job one, priority one,” he said. “We need to make it such that if you’re a transgressor in this space, the new deal is you got to beat all of us to beat one of us.”

Suzanne Smalley

Written by Suzanne Smalley

Suzanne joined CyberScoop from Inside Higher Ed, where she covered educational technology and from Yahoo News, where she worked as an investigative reporter. Prior to Yahoo News, Suzanne worked as a consultant to the economist Raj Chetty as he launched his Harvard-based research institute Opportunity Insights. Earlier in her career Suzanne covered the Boston Police Department for the Boston Globe and covered two presidential campaigns for Newsweek. She holds a masters in journalism from Northwestern and a BA from Georgetown. A Miami native, Suzanne lives in upper Northwest Washington with her family.

Latest Podcasts