The Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has several roles in the department’s cybersecurity mission including information sharing and analysis, the agency’s acting director said on Tuesday.
Most of I&A’s intelligence office personnel are “embedded physically” with the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has responsibility for protecting networks, understanding the threats against the networks, and helping with resilience, Melissa Smislova, acting under secretary for I&A, said during an event hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.
“We provide them the access to the intelligence from the intelligence community,” she said. “We do our typical analytic role and our responsibility there is to push the information out to non-traditional consumers of intelligence as well as to the intelligence community and that’s a role we play more in the cyber space than we do in many of the other spaces in that we play a critical role analyzing not only what we understand about these adversaries from traditional intelligence collection but what we pick up inside the United States, which is often from our CISA colleagues. So, it’s a very close relationship.”
Smislova added that I&A also works to analyze “the implications of the threats and maybe what the threat actor was aiming to achieve.”
The Office of I&A is the only member of the intelligence community that is authorized in statute to provide intelligence to state, local, tribal, territorial and private sector partners, and developing intelligence from those partners for DHS and the intelligence community.
Smislova’s comments during the INSA event were interesting because little attention is typically focused on the Office of I&A’s role in cybersecurity within DHS. CISA, which has responsibility for helping protect federal civilian networks and working with the private sector to manage cybersecurity risks, has the starring role for cybersecurity in DHS. The Secret Service, Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement also have cybersecurity missions.
The Office of I&A is in the early stages of applying artificial intelligence tools to its work in cyberspace, Smislova said. In this case, I&A is using these tools with “some of the information we collect from cyber adversaries, understanding the information we that get from the intelligence community and then what we might have from our partners inside the United States that are giving us cyber information.”
She also said that her office is “interested” in applying artificial intelligence to “some of our vetting requirements” as well as foreign malign influence efforts against the U.S.