CISA Partners With Industry, Government on New Cyber Defense Initiative; Jen Easterly Quoted

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has launched a new initiative to drive the development and execution of cyber defense operations plans in partnership with the private sector, federal interagency and state, local, tribal, territorial government stakeholders.

The Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative is aimed at reducing cyber incident risks and coordinating defensive response of federal agencies, private companies and SLTT governments, CISA said Thursday.

Aside from plan development and implementation, the JCDC will also promote joint understanding of cyber defense challenges and opportunities through insight sharing efforts, and seek to enhance cyber defense operations through collective exercises.

“Our initial focus will be on efforts to combat ransomware and developing a planning framework to coordinate incidents affecting cloud service providers,” said Jen Easterly, director of CISA.

Amazon Web Services, AT&T (NYSE: T), Crowdstrike, FireEye Mandiant, Google‘s (Nasdaq: GOOGL) cloud business, Lumen, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) are the agency’s initial industry partners for the JCDC, while its government partners are the departments of Defense and Justice, U.S. Cyber Command, National Security Agency, FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The industry partners that have agreed to work side-by-side with CISA and our interagency teammates share the same commitment to defending our country’s national critical functions from cyber intrusions, and the imagination to spark new solutions,” added Easterly.

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