ACT-IAC Cybersecurity Innovation Initiative 4.Adopting a Threat-Aware Proactive Defense

(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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »