U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano outlined the steps DHS is taking to secure cyberspace at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco on Wednesday. The former governor of Arizona also called upon experts and the public to contribute ideas to improve the nation’s cybersecurity.
“All Americans have an important role to play in securing our computer systems and cyber networks,” Napolitano said. “We are challenging our nation’s best and brightest to utilize their expertise and creativity to devise new ways to engage the public in the shared responsibility of safeguarding our cyber resources and information.”
Boosting Infrastructure Security
In her keynote address, Napolitano stressed DHS’s dedication to recruiting and retaining the cybersecurity employees needed to confront terrorist and criminal threats. Moreover, she emphasized the department’s commitment to supporting innovations such as EINSTEIN — an intrusion detection program originally developed by US-CERT, the department’s computer emergency readiness team.
“In the past year we’ve deployed the second phase of EINSTEIN to 11 federal agencies, and we will be growing to 21 this year,” Napolitano noted. “And now we are testing the technology for the third phase of EINSTEIN,” which will give DHS “the ability to detect malicious activity and disable attempted intrusions before harm is done to our critical systems.”
Ensuring U.S. government continuity as well as private-sector services and information — even as it protects privacy — are among the important tasks DHS now faces, Napolitano said. To meet these challenges, DHS has developed “a national cybersecurity incident response plan in full collaboration with the private sector” that will be tested during an exercise in September.
What’s more, DHS efforts continue to focus on “providing the ability to bounce back even more quickly should a large-scale attack — or really an attack of any size — occur,” Napolitano said. To this end,…