A new report out from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) outlines 37 open recommendations that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should prioritize, including an important one at the heart of how DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) undertakes its mission.
Among the open recommendations is a new directive for CISA to assess whether the “current mix of centralized and federated sharing methods used by the agencies is the optimal approach to addressing the cyber threat sharing challenges.”
GAO called on CISA to also evaluate whether existing sharing methods should be retired.
DHS agreed with the recommendation and stated that CISA would coordinate with the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) to evaluate the feasibility of conducting a comprehensive assessment of existing information sharing methods.
In February 2024, CISA said it had gained insight into the challenges and opportunities related to cybersecurity threat information sharing through extensive prior and ongoing engagement efforts with ONCD and Federal agencies. As such, CISA stated that conducting a separate comprehensive assessment would be duplicative to those efforts.
CISA told GAO it will work with ONCD to confirm whether those efforts provide the insights needed to address cyber threat information sharing challenges in an optimal manner, and will make decisions about potential adjustments to related activities, as appropriate.
“However, DHS has not yet documented the results of CISA’s engagement efforts with ONCD and federal agencies. As such, it is unclear the extent to which those efforts provided full insight into whether the current mix of sharing methods is optimal for addressing the sharing challenges – including whether existing sharing methods should be retired,” the GAO report says.
“To fully implement this recommendation, DHS should complete and document its proposed comprehensive assessment to help determine whether existing sharing methods are optimal or whether any method should be retired,” the report concludes.
In June 2023, GAO identified 42 priority recommendations for DHS. According to GAO, DHS has since implemented 16 of those recommendations. In its Aug. 26, 2024, report, the watchdog identified 11 additional priority recommendations for DHS, bringing the total number to 37.
One recommendation is related to training special agents of the U.S. Secret Service. The remaining 36 recommendations fall into the following seven areas:
- Emergency preparedness and response;
- Border security;
- Countering violent extremism and domestic terrorism;
- Domestic intelligence and information sharing;
- Information technology and cybersecurity;
- Chemical security; and
- Infrastructure, acquisition, and management.
