Just over a month in the job leading the Department of Homeland Security’s agency billed as the nation’s “quarterback” for cybersecurity, Jen Easterly on Tuesday outlined her near-term priorities, which include being more “proactive” and putting all stakeholders in a better position to defend themselves.
Easterly also said that she’s focused on getting the resources the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) needs, with hiring and retaining people topping the list.
“We are working on ensuring that we can attract and retain the best talent and underpin that with the best culture so a lot of focus here spent on the technical and the operational but very importantly on the people and the culture,” she said during the quarterly meeting of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC).
As to her near-term priorities, Easterly told the NSTAC that she wants to move the nation’s cybersecurity from a “reactive and defensive posture to one that is proactive and focused on resilience.”
A second priority is taking advantage of CISA’s statutory authorities and its partnerships across the federal government, the private sector and with academia to “really empowering our partners to enable them to “collectively defend the nation in cyberspace,” she said.
Finally, Easterly said, is also the need to take advantage of CISA’s national coordination authorities and responsibilities to drive “positive and sustainable and measurable change across the critical infrastructure community,” that can’t be viewed as “silos” but are “interconnected and interdependent.”
Jeffrey Greene, the acting senior director on the White House National Security Council’s Cyber Directorate, briefly updated the NSTAC on the implementation of President Joe Biden’s executive order in May designed to strengthen the federal government’s hand in improving the cybersecurity of the supply chain as well as bolstering its own security practices.
Nearly 100 days after the executive order was published, Greene said federal agencies have met all their deadlines so far, and that the government is “on the path toward achieving the goals that the president wanted.”