Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Jessica Rosenworcel wants the recently restarted FCC Interagency Cybersecurity Forum to focus on creating harmony between how the private sector and the Federal government implement cybersecurity controls.
Rosenworcel set the forum’s objectives at an April 8 meeting between the forum’s principals, which includes National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Rob Silvers, Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger, as well as representatives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and more.
“Our chief objective now is to harmonize how private sector industries implement essential cybersecurity controls and how independent and executive branch regulatory agencies can ensure their work advances those efforts,” Rosenworcel said in her opening. “We’ve identified two places to start.”
Rosenworcel said that the first place that the forum can focus on harmonizing that response is by looking to get consistency in compliance with the Federal government’s new critical infrastructure incident reporting law and the reporting of cyber incidents more generally.
“Right now, there’s a lot of fragmentation across sectors and jurisdictions in what information gets reported, when and how it is reported, and how that information can be used,” Rosenworcel said. “So we’ll discuss using this Forum as a place to work toward greater convergence on these matters.”
The other area the forum will work on to boost its efforts on creating harmony between the private and public sectors is through advancing the goals laid out in President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order, which included measures like multi-factor authentication and more broadly moving towards a zero trust architecture.
The forum’s relaunch was announced in February, and the latest meeting explains the group’s initial goals.
“Many have asked why it is important that we revitalize this group now. To that, I would say the membership is the message. Cybersecurity is an issue for everyone, everywhere,” Rosenworcel said. “We are revitalizing this group and we are doing it now because no threat facing our national and economic security has grown as fast as the threat of cyberattacks, and because we know that no single entity can meet this challenge alone.”
“But here’s the good news. We have a lot of momentum behind us already,” she said.
