Will Obama’s New Cyber-Security Plan Make a Difference? We Can Only Hope

This morning, US President Barack Obama unveiled the outlines of a change in direction for US cyber-security policy. The first announcement relates to the creation of a new military command that will centralize and expand on existing cyber-war-fighting capabilities. This is overdue, and should bring more coherence to efforts that were already spread out between several different military branches, notably the Army, Navy and Air Force), and the intelligence services. The NSA, for example, has long had a “red-team” offensive capability in addition to defensive corps. As I understand it, the new military cyber-command will reside in the Department of Defense. Less clear is whether the new organization will just be a military operation, or whether it will also take over parts of the intelligence services’ capabilities.

The second part of today's announcements, the Cyberspace Policy Review, seeks to reform the way the US Government secures itself, its agencies and critical infrastructure like the stock exchanges. As reported in a story in the New York Times, the reforms will create a new office residing in the White House that will report to both the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. The remainder of this blog post analyzes what the plan, which was unveiled at 11 today, recommends.

Where We Came From

But first, a little background. Most security-watchers know that the last big attempt to improve government security was FISMA, the Federal Information Security Management Act. The Act codified an approach to protecting government systems. It required all federal agencies to assess the risk of their information systems, implement minimum baseline security controls as defined by NIST, and most critically, certify and accredit that each agencies' systems had in fact implemented the required security controls. The tangible outcome of the process was a related “scorecard” exercise undertaken by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The idea was to give letter grades (A through F) to each agency.

In theory, this sounds like a good idea. In practice, it did little to improve security. The evidence is everywhere. We've all read the reports in the news about perfidious Chinese hackers, opportunist Ruskies and the like snooping around federal systems and systematically looting them of all their treasures. The picture painted in the press is of a government whose variously-accredited and certified systems are nonetheless wide-open to hackers. While it's hard for most people to get a real sense of the scope of the problem from the papers, people I've spoken to who do government contract work for a living tell me that the stories we've seen are just the tip of the iceberg. And on a personal note, I can tell you that in my past I've helped investigate an incident involving an attack on a military weapons program by foreign attackers. So the dangers seem clear and present to me.

What’s Wrong with the Current Approach?

So, what's wrong with FISMA, and does this review address? In my view, FISMA serves a useful function because it defines how the risk assessment, control selection and audit processes are supposed to work at a federal level. This is a good, but it is important to remember that FISMA is mostly about compliance with a security program and its processes, and not about the effectiveness of the security itself. Practically speaking, what FISMA and the annual House scorecarding ritual did was:

• Create incentives to “finish the audit” rather than make systems more secure


• Force answers to the wrong question: “are you accredited” rather than “how secure are you?”


• Conflate compliance with security


• Create a strange new vocabulary out of step with the private sector. (Ask Goldman Sachs or Bank of America about the importance of their “accredited systems” and they will look at you like you have two heads)


• Focus on inputs (controls) rather than outputs (KPIs and attacks)


• Divert vast amounts of cash to auditors and other “process”-focused Beltway Bandits

And beyond FISMA, the current approach did not:

• Effectively share attack and intrusion data with the private sector


• Coordinate the federal agencies with shared responsibilities for security: Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, Energy, Treasury and others


• Consolidate responsibilities for cyber-defense and responding to attacks

What the Review Recommends

The review recommends the following 10 actions, which I have reprinted and lightly edited:

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