Cyber Defense Agency

Aug 4, 2023

One of the most important US government agencies that might be lesser known is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also known as CISA. As America's Cyber Defense Agency and the National Coordinator for Critical Infrastructure, Resilience and Security, CISA leads a national effort to understand, manage and reduce risk to the cyber and physical infrastructure that Americans rely on every hour of every day. In a recent interview on a GovFuture podcast , Martin Stanley who is the Strategic Technology Branch Chief, Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at CISA shared how the agency is dealing with constantly evolving threats to physical and cyber infrastructure as well as leveraging the capabilities of AI and quantum to deal with those threats. The origins of CISA Martin Stanley, Strategic Technology Branch Chief, Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans at CISA In the podcast, Mr. Stanley shares that “CISA has long had its primary roots going all the way back to the initiation of our division, which was the National Cyber Security Division at DHS, which was an incident response shop. We have a long history of working with stakeholders in a trusted way to assist them in responding to the evolution of the cyber threat. Specifically what we do is we respond to particular incidents that are reported to us. Congress just passed the CISA legislation, which is an incident reporting requirement for certain entities to report cyber incidents to CISA for three purposes: One is for us to render aid. The second is for us to understand how others could potentially be at risk and then also to develop responses to these campaigns. And in that regard, the final purpose is to lead cyber responses. For example, the nationwide response to Log4J, the nationwide response to Solar Winds, and other major cyber incidents. That was all led by our agency.” He continues, “On that note, AI represents a set of emerging threats in that malicious actors can use the increasingly powerful capabilities of AI, especially Generative AI, to create all sorts of havoc. Similarly, AI represents opportunities in that the use of AI can help to detect and thwart cyber and physical attacks.” According to Mr. Stanley, “We provide resources. We do a lot of trend analysis. That gets to AI, where we can potentially do a lot better and a lot faster with the data that we have coming in from different sources to identify when there's potential campaigns. And then, being able to quickly share that with the nation's cyber defenders in an effective way. We can do it at the tactical, but also at the broadly strategic level as well.” MORE FOR YOU