CISA Publishes New Cybersecurity Strategic Plan

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a new Cybersecurity Strategic Plan that will guide CISA’s efforts through fiscal year 2026 Aligned with the White House National Cybersecurity Strategy and nested under CISA’s overall Strategic Plan, the new CISA plan provides a blueprint for how the agency will address current and future cyber threats, help organizations become more secure and resilient, and ensure that technology products are secure by design and default. To this end, the Strategic Plan outlines three enduring goals: 

  • Address Immediate Threats by making it increasingly difficult for our adversaries to achieve their goals by targeting American and allied networks; 
  • Harden the Terrain by adopting strong practices for security and resilience that measurably reduce the likelihood of damaging intrusions; and 
  • Drive Security at Scale by prioritizing cybersecurity as a fundamental safety issue and ask more of technology providers to build security into products throughout their lifecycle, ship products with secure defaults, and foster radical transparency into their security practices so that customers clearly understand the risks they are accepting by using each product. 

Under the plan CISA’s efforts must have have a measurable impact in reducing cybersecurity risk. This emphasis on impact includes the creation of better outcome-based measures of effectiveness. . 

DHS seeks counter-UAS capabilities

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) released a Request for Information (RFI) seeking technologies and solutions to counter small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). The RFI will be used to invite respondents whose capabilities are selected to participate in two DHS-funded sUAS mitigation demonstrations scheduled for July 10-28, 2023, and July 2024 at the Northern Plains UAS Test Site in North Dakota.

“This effort is designed to expand our knowledge of kinetic sUAS mitigation technologies and how they apply to the multiple DHS mission sets,” said Shawn McDonald, S&T Counter-UAS Program Manager in a press release issued by DHS. “Information and data collected during this event will assist S&T in understanding, measuring and minimizing collateral effects.”

Selected technologies and solutions will test under the direction of the DHS C-UAS program, which assesses C-UAS technologies both in laboratory and real-world operational environments to deliver critical C-UAS capabilities to DHS components.

This RFI is for participation in the demonstration events only. DHS will not award a contract based on this RFI, but selected participants may be asked to sign a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. government.

Industry, academic institutions, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, and other government organizations interested in participating must submit their response to the RFI via email to cuasprogramsupport@hq.dhs.gov by 10:00 AM ET on May 5, 2023.