Responding to the Most Urgent Government Cyber Threats More Efficiently

The federal government’s attack surface continues to increase at an accelerating rate. To provide effective protection, federal cybersecurity leaders must expand their focus beyond IT to include threats against all physical and virtual assets connected to the network, including operational technology (OT), the Internet of Things (IoT), building management systems, and more.

As NextGov/FCW published, I believe improved asset visibility is just the first step towards more effective cybersecurity. Agencies need to understand each asset’s role in their environments, prioritize which threats must be urgently addressed, and enable staff through intelligent automation to act and protect their mission services.

These three steps correspond to the high-level goals of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program. Many agencies are expanding their use of CDM tools to address the complexities of IT/OT convergence, strengthening the overall cybersecurity posture of the government to ensure the entire attack surface is defended and managed in real-time. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has requested $421 million for its CDM program to address cyber threats to federal civilian networks.

Specifically, here are three recommendations for agencies to improve their cybersecurity posture and to comply with recent mandates and guidance, such as the The Biden Administration’s cybersecurity executive order and CISA’s binding operational directive 23-01:

Understand the Attack Surface

Comprehensive visibility drives informed and intelligent risk management. Agencies can start by mapping all assets to their security tools, providing real-time data on the effectiveness of the current security stack, and highlighting existing gaps and duplicated protection.

Streamline Response

Determine which vulnerabilities are most likely to be exploited and impact the agency mission by leveraging technology enhanced by actionable threat intelligence from the private sector. When these most pressing threats are identified, agencies can deploy safeguards and report on the quality of critical cybersecurity deployments to ensure they align with overall cyber goals.

Automate Information Flow

Agencies can take advantage of innovative technology from the private sector to automate the remediation process and reduce the average time to recover from exploits.

Armis Can Help

Armis Centrix™, our FedRAMP and DISA IL authorized AI-driven platform, helps agencies protect their entire attack surface and manage cyber risk exposure in real time. From the ground to the cloud, agencies can see and secure their entire attack surface inside and outside the perimeter, across IT, OT, IoT, and IoMT.

Armis delivers rapid time-to-value through a cloud-native, flexible solution with hundreds of integrations to critical security and IT tools. Armis Centrix™ is the foundation on which modern cyber programs build and optimize.

Agency leaders cannot rely on legacy security technology to defend against today’s AI-powered attacks. New technology and tools that can integrate into existing security infrastructure are available to protect against rising cyber threats.