ACT-IAC Cybersecurity Innovation Initiative Ideas

Part 1 - Security Risk Management
(Regular print are supported ITAPS recommendations in response to questions, italics are expanded recommendations to more explicitly address questions, not directly addressed by ITAPS; participated in and collaborated with ITAPS OMB-OPM-NSC Task Force)

1. Addressing Cyber Fundamentals
How do we move from inconsistent security/privacy protection control approaches to solid fundamentals... more »

(Regular print are supported ITAPS recommendations in response to questions, flagged are expanded recommendations to more explicitly address questions, not directly addressed by ITAPS; participated in and collaborated with ITAPS OMB-OPM-NSC Task Force)

How should the government expand beyond its emphasis on perimeter defense and even defense-in-depth, and instead put more relative resources toward combining actionable... more »

Provide for the escalation of risk-based decisions through senior leadership if critical security recommendations are rejected by owners of business lines or applications, ensuring critical security decisions are not made in isolation. For example, decisions to keep critical systems available while overriding security recommendations should no longer be routinely deferred exclusively to network, system, or application... more »

(Regular print are supported ITAPS recommendations in response to questions, flagged are expanded recommendations to more explicitly address questions, not directly addressed by ITAPS; participated in and collaborated with ITAPS OMB-OPM-NSC Task Force)

With the continued and growing dependence of the government on commercially provided IT services, what changes are needed to government acquisition policies and practices... more »

Security/Privacy Protection Controls consistency is critical to mitigating organizational risk. Risk mitigation begins at the highest level of an organization. It is a combination of three key things—governance, accountability, and culture. Implementing an organizational governance process will bring myriad benefits, including lower costs, greater control, and overall increased efficiency and effectiveness. A benchmarked... more »

Currently, the government is still focused on perimeter defense will only a shallow defense-in-depth strategy. The problem centers on an enterprise architecture that is designed to usually protect the entire network at the same level, thus peanut butter spreading network defense resources. Agencies fail built a network defense strategy that focus on protecting their crown jewels, vulnerability reduction, and adversary... more »

Threat data sharing or cybersecurity-related information sharing is essential to the protection of the federal government, other critical infrastructure sectors, and to furthering cybersecurity for the Nation. The government needs to set the global standard on establishing an environment that facilitates threat data information sharing, it still operates in silos. Action must be taken to arm stakeholders with needed information... more »

As enterprises strive to gain value by leveraging technology, the risk associated with digital business is increasing. Isolated approaches to information security, business continuity and incident response are a thing of the past; today, the urgency of providing continuously available services for customers and business partners in the digital economy requires enterprises to become resilient. A resilient enterprise protects... more »

Build security into the front end of development activities so that tailored standards could be used to address appropriate risk factors in test/dev settings – create DMZ for developers, who build knowing security policies in advance

Clarify a “hotline” reporting channel for people who suspect an issue, in agency or government-wide – if a user sees a potential problem, can check with team to for tech assistance on whether it’s real and what are next steps. Sort of a help desk for cyber reporting.

What is your most important line of business or function of your agency? What are your crown jewels (as another author here wrote)? What is the risk to those? What does the enemy want to achieve? This is the just the starting point of protecting your agency or business. Today, it is important to create a threat-aware proactive defense around your Cyber Key Terrain (C-KT) and manage the risk per line of business or... more »

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) did a great job describing what is needed to have a good cyber security posture, but it leaves you hanging on how do you do it; what are good practices; how do you measure it? To help assess the operational cyber defense posture of Department of Defense (DoD) systems, Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD), Director Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) developed metrics using the... more »

By nature, defensive safeguards place the adversary in control; he need only breach one point of weakness to reach success. In contrast, the defender must attempt to cover all possible weaknesses. Shoring up these weaknesses becomes a costly enterprise and the economies of scale help ensure the attacker maintains the advantage.

Current security tools independently address weaknesses; suites of tools offer more complete... more »