From: GCN
By Matt Brown
The current IT landscape has been hit with an unprecedented number of cyberattacks, and the number is only growing. In fact, the number of cyberincidents reported by federal agencies to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team has increased from 5,503 in fiscal year 2006 to 48,562 in fiscal year 2012, an increase of 782 percent. Unfortunately, defensive cybermeasures alone are no longer enough to ensure networks remain secure. Organizations must set up proactive, automated vulnerability and attack identification that enables personnel to take immediate action to defend against the current threat landscape.
To accelerate the push toward continuous monitoring, the Department of Homeland Security developed a watershed project – the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program – to defend the government’s IT network infrastructure from sophisticated and aggressive cyber threats.
The CDM program enables each agency to implement the tools and processes necessary to feed real-time sensor data through their own customized dashboards to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
To meet this goal, agencies must integrate technologies, train personnel, build processes and customize data feeds, using time and resources many simply don’t have. To address these constraints, DHS incorporated a continuous-monitoring-as-a-service (CMaaS) approach into the program, allowing agencies to access the services necessary to design, set up and maintain a continuous monitoring program.
Agencies opting for a CMaaS approach to CDM should first address these five elements:
1. Security-focused goal. To successfully monitor cyber threats, agencies need to know why they are monitoring those threats in the first place. Goals and priorities should remain security focused, not compliance focused. Defining the end goal will help get everyone on the same page, which is particularly important for those whose roles have differing priorities – such as the chief information officer and chief information security officer.
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