CISA document process raises security concerns: It’s unclear why CISA posted its request for fired employees to send a password-protected attachment containing personally identifiable information to a publicly promoted email address. It’s also unclear how the password-protected document process would work. CISA did not respond to CSO’s request for clarification.Some cybersecurity professionals cast doubt on how secure such a submission could be. Veteran cybersecurity professional Nate Allen told CSO, “Unless all these employees have prior training and a standard, supported method of creating encrypted attachments, which I truly doubt with all my soul, this is basically asking for all sorts of problems.”
White House exempted cybersecurity workers from mass layoffs: Still, the reversal of the CISA firings follows other good news for government cybersecurity workers. Last week, Greg Barbaccia, the United States federal CIO, urged federal agencies to refrain from laying off cybersecurity teams as they raced to complete plans for mass layoffs within their departments and agencies.Barbaccia was responding to questions about whether cybersecurity employees’ work is national securityrelated and, therefore, exempt from layoffs.”We believe cybersecurity is national security and we encourage Department-level Chief Information Officers to consider this when reviewing their organizations,” he wrote in the email to information technology employees across the federal government.”Skilled cyber security professionals” play “a vital role in mission delivery and information assurance,” Barbaccia said. “We are confident federal agencies will be able to identify efficiencies across their non-cyber mission areas without negatively affecting their agency’s cyber posture,” he added.
First seen on csoonline.com
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