CISA releases Cybersecurity Strategic Plan

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Following the White House’s March release of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released its Cybersecurity Strategic Plan.

“We know that connected technologies underpin every aspect of our lives, our businesses, our communities, our families, often in ways that allow us to be more connected, productive, efficient than ever before,” CISA wrote in its official release. “But malicious cyber actors recognize this dependence as well, and continuously work to exploit it for financial or strategic gain.”

The agency goes on to credit the successes of hackers in an environment where products have become too vulnerable and the enterprises surrounding them too difficult to defend. As a result, the Cybersecurity Strategic Plan serves as blueprint for change regarding the trajectory of national cybersecurity risk. The plan is aligned around three goals:

Goal 1: Address Immediate Threats, making it increasingly difficult for adversaries to achieve their goals by targeting American and allied networks.

Goal 2: Harden the Terrain. Catalyzing, supporting, and measuring the adoption of strong practices for security and resilience that measurably reduce the likelihood of damaging intrusions.

Goal 3: Drive Security at Scale. Their intent to drive prioritization of cybersecurity as a fundamental safety issue and ask more of technology providers to build security into products throughout their lifecycle, ship products with secure defaults, and foster radical transparency into their security practices so that customers clearly understand the risks they are accepting by using each product.

Moreover, CISA said their strategy reaches beyond overarching goals and addresses specific measures of effectiveness that determine not just whether the work was done, but that it was effective in its efforts.

“Ultimately cybersecurity is a whole of CISA, whole of government, whole of nation mission. It takes every one of us to contribute to our individual and societal security,” CISA added.

For the full plan and unabridged goals please see www.cisa.gov.