Homeland Security to Debut Cybersecurity, Communications Integration Center
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will cut the ribbon on the federal government’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) this week, she said Wednesday. With the convergence of communications and Internet technology, the government must collocate and make interoperable its cyber response mechanisms, she told the Meridian conference on global critical infrastructure protection in Washington.
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U.S. government networks are attacked thousands of times daily, and the FBI recently charged nearly 100 people in the U.S. and abroad with one of the largest cyber-fraud cases in history, Napolitano said. That’s why the department has consolidated “everything cyber” under the National Protection and Programs Directorate, charged with improving coordination among the government, industry and international partners. The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) is now in the same chain of command to Napolitano as the National Cyber Security Division and its U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US- CERT), she said.
The NCCIC, pronounced “N-kick,” will bring together in a single building disparate information-technology centers that deal with cyber and communications disruptions and incident response, Napolitano said. It will include the National Coordinating Center, US-CERT, the Office for Intelligence and Analysis and NCSC, integrating their functions at the new facility, and in a second phase industry partners will be incorporated with their own offices at the building, she said. The second initiative is the National Cyber Incident Response Plan. Officials have been drafting a report and plan to host a “tabletop exercise” next month, with a target date of December or January for “full intergovernmental coordination of a first draft” of the response plan, she said. It will be similar to the government’s regularly updated response plans for natural disasters.
It’s time for a global effort on cybersecurity, building on October’s cybersecurity awareness month in the U.S., Napolitano said. Officials must “anticipate it and get ahead of” potential cyber threats with their international partners and drop the notion that security and IT are separate from government and businesses’ “core competencies,” she said. “We all went about our lives as if nothing had changed technologically.”