Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leads the United States’ national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure. CISA connects stakeholders in industry and government to each other and to resources, analyses, and tools to help them build their own cybersecurity program. CISA aids with communications, physical security, and cybersecurity resilience. This in turn helps ensure a secure and resilient infrastructure for the American people.

CISA acts as the quarterback for the federal cybersecurity team, protecting and defending the home front, and federal civilian government networks, in close partnership with the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for federal cyber security overall. CISA also coordinates the execution of national cyber defense, leading asset response for significant cyber incidents, and ensures that timely and actionable information is shared across federal and non-federal and private sector partners. Sign up for CISA email Alerts here.

Although it appears that CISA works mainly with the federal government, it was created in 2018 to work across public and private sectors, challenging traditional ways of doing business by engaging with government, industry, academic, and international partners. As threats continue to evolve, no single organization or entity has all the answers for how to address cyber and physical threats to critical infrastructure. But by bringing together CISA’s insight and capabilities, they can help build a collective defense against the threats we face.

What does this mean for an SMB or MSP?

CISA likely won’t mean too much for your SMB or MSP, but they should be on your IT staff’s radar. CISA often puts out advisories or warnings about specific threats that impact a large number of companies. It’s not a bad idea to subscribe to CISA’s US-CERT-Alerts RSS feed, which will send these advisories to you whenever they become published on CISA’s site. In addition to keeping an eye out for these alerts, taking action on the following items will help your company become more aware and more secure.

CyberHoot’s Minimum Essential Cybersecurity Recommendations

The following recommendations will help you and your business stay secure with the various threats you may face on a day-to-day basis. All of the suggestions listed below can be gained by hiring CyberHoot’s vCISO Program development services.

Govern employees with policies and procedures. You need a password policy, an acceptable use policy, an information handling policy, and a written information security program (WISP) at a minimum.

Train employees on how to spot and avoid phishing attacks. Adopt a Learning Management system like CyberHoot to teach employees the skills they need to be more confident, productive, and secure.

Test employees with Phishing attacks to practice. CyberHoot’s Phish testing allows businesses to test employees with believable phishing attacks and put those that fail into remedial phish training.

Deploy critical cybersecurity technology including two-factor authentication on all critical accounts. Enable email SPAM filtering, validate backups, and deploy DNS protection, antivirus, and anti-malware on all your endpoints.

In the modern Work-from-Home era, make sure you’re managing personal devices connecting to your network by validating their security (patching, antivirus, DNS protections) or prohibiting their use entirely.

If you haven’t had a risk assessment by a 3rd party in the last 2 years, you should have one now. Establishing a risk management framework in your organization is critical to addressing your most egregious risks with your finite time and money.

Buy Cyber-Insurance to protect you in a catastrophic failure situation. Cyber-Insurance is no different than Car, Fire, Flood, or Life insurance. It’s there when you need it most.

Each of these recommendations, except cyber-insurance, is built into CyberHoot’s product and virtual Chief Information Security Officer services. With CyberHoot you can govern, train, assess, and test your employees. Visit CyberHoot.com and sign up for our services today. At the very least continue to learn by enrolling in our monthly Cybersecurity newsletters to stay on top of current cybersecurity updates.

To learn more about CISA, watch this short 2-minute video:

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