The Department of Homeland Security today formally announced its July 31 cybersecurity summit in New York City, calling it “a launching point for a number of DHS initiatives to advance cybersecurity and critical infrastructure risk management.”
“The Department of Homeland Security will host a National Cybersecurity Summit on July 31, 2018 at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City, New York,” the department said in a release. “The DHS National Cybersecurity Summit will bring together a broad group of stakeholders across government, industry, and academia to lay out a vision for a collective defense model to protect our nation’s critical infrastructure. Through panels, keynote addresses, and breakout sessions, the summit will serve as a launching point for a number of DHS initiatives to advance cybersecurity and critical infrastructure risk management.”
DHS said the Defense Department, NSA, FBI, Energy Department and Treasury, as well as industry CEOs, will be represented.
“An interconnected world offers a myriad of benefits to American businesses and the public, but the innovations and conveniences of modern technology pose new and complex security challenges,” Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in the statement. “With the majority of critical infrastructure owned and operated by the private sector, it is essential that we maintain strong partnerships between DHS and the private sector to underpin our collective defense against the evolving threats we all face. Because of our increasing hyper-connectivity, cybersecurity remains a shared responsibility; too big for anyone acting alone. This summit is another opportunity to gather our interagency and private partners and chart our shared path to protect our nation’s critical infrastructure against cyber threats and achieve a secure and resilient cyberspace.”
Christopher Krebs, Under Secretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, said: “There is an evident need for a coordinated, cross-sector, government-industry effort to protect our nation’s critical infrastructure from the growing cybersecurity threat. DHS is leading the federal government’s efforts to champion that coordinated, integrated approach and this summit is a clear signal from government and industry alike that we need to move beyond simply sharing threat information – we need to advance efforts to manage risk in a prioritized manner. The summit is just the start of that movement, as we sprint forward with a shared vision of the actions and respective expectations of how we will address risk together.”
Krebs said recently that the department will have a number of announcements this month related to its risk-management approach.
Internet Security Alliance president Larry Clinton told Inside Cybersecurity that, “leading up to the summit, there have been serious, productive conversations with industry on partnerships, cybersecurity spending, incentives, law enforcement and other issues. There have been ongoing weekly meetings, sometimes twice weekly.”
DHS leaders “have done a good job of listening, and industry has come forward and been even more assertive on what needs to be done,” Clinton commented.