Dive Brief:
- National Cyber Director Chris Inglis said the Biden administration’s long-anticipated national cybersecurity strategy could be ready as early as late November but may take a couple of additional months for final completion.
- Inglis, speaking at the mWISE conference in Washington D.C. Wednesday, said the strategy would focus heavily on international cybersecurity issues as well as workforce development concerns, a major issue for the information security industry.
- Officials have made considerable outreach to the private sector in terms of developing the strategy, with two-thirds of about 300 engagements being made with private industry officials.
Dive Insight:
Inglis previewed the security strategy and other pressing issues in the information security space during a keynote fireside chat with Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia.
In order to get the national cybersecurity strategy done correctly, Inglis said, it will need to put cybersecurity in its proper place in society. It will also address the needs and concerns of a much wider group of people, well beyond those who have cyber or IT in their job titles.
Inglis said working in a collaborative effort to create a defensible enterprise is going to be key to making the cybersecurity strategy work.
“But at the end of the day, we’ll address market forces, it will address the international domain, it will address, how do we actually get critical infrastructure into the right place,” Inglis said.
Unlike earlier waves when threat actors were focused on data and systems, attacks in the last five to 10 years seem to be designed to undermine public confidence, Inglis said.
Inglis specifically referenced the Colonial Pipeline attack, which may have been aimed at attacking the technology or the critical functions of fuel delivery. But Inglis sees the Colonial attack and others like it as an attack on public confidence.
“Millions of people up and down the Eastern Seaboard went to the darkest possible corner, thinking just like a hurricane sweeping the white bread off the store shelves, that they needed to flood the gas stations and essentially extract petroleum from that pipeline,” Inglis said.
