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CISA has just launched a new program designed to monitor cyber threats to critical infrastructure and use that information to correlate threat activity across a wide range of sectors.
Called CyberSentry, the new program is entirely voluntary and provides real-time monitoring for those taking part.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) manages the entire affair, integrating its own hardware and software into partnering facilities, and at no cost. This offers CISA and its partners the ability to monitor both IT and OT environments for “known and unknown malicious activity”.
In pointing out the necessity for the program, Jermaine Roebuck, associate director for threat hunting at CISA, observed that both Russia and China are more than capable of threatening critical infrastructure, and some cases, are even improving their capacity to target things such as “including underwater cables and industrial control systems” both in the US and abroad.
“Facing such a challenging threat environment, we must focus our efforts on a two-pronged strategy of defence — on driving adoption of strong cyber security measures, and on ensuring effective visibility into cyber threats targeting our nation’s critical infrastructure,” Roebuck said in a statement.
“Right now, we are able to achieve a portion of this visibility by partnering with critical infrastructure organisations and cyber security companies, forging and maintaining crucial relationships with our partners for the betterment of our nation.
“But for some of the nation’s most critical entities, we need to do more. And that leads us to CyberSentry.”
CyberSentry’s threat detection capabilities will allow the collection of threat activity at scale, which will then be shared with the wider cyber security industry. And if an event is detected, CISA can inform and work with the affected partner to mitigate and defend against the attack, even going so far as to deploy its analysts to “hunt down active cyber threats”.
The program is part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law in 2021 by President Joe Biden. The act has a total budget of US$768 billion, covering both cyber security and defence spending.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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