CISA releases cybersecurity response plans for federal agencies

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released new cybersecurity response plans (known as playbooks) for federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies.

CISA's newly published operational procedures are designed to streamline the process of mitigating security vulnerabilities and responding to incidents with the help of easy-to-read decision trees and detailed info for each step.

The playbooks standardize the response process and aim to reduce associated risks across the federal government, private and public sectors.

"These playbooks provide FCEB agencies with a standard set of procedures to identify, coordinate, remediate, recover, and track successful mitigations from incidents and vulnerabilities affecting FCEB systems, data, and networks," CISA said (PDF).

"In addition, future iterations of these playbooks may be useful for organizations outside of the FCEB to standardize incident response practices."

The release of the two playbooks was set in motion by President Biden's Executive Order 14028, "Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity," signed on May 12th to modernize the cybersecurity defenses of the federal government's infrastructure against cyberattacks.

Biden's executive order followed a string of cyberattacks targeting US public and private sector organizations in the last twelve months, including the SolarWinds supply chain attacks from December and the more rec

The playbooks also build on CISA's Binding Operational Directive 22-01 that ordered federal civilian agencies to mitigate software and hardware security vulnerabilities exploited in the wild on a more aggressive timeline.

The two initiatives' goal is to help federal agencies and public/private sector orgs to keep pace with ongoing threat activity by reducing their exposure to cyberattacks.

While aimed at federal agencies, CISA also encourages public and private sector partners, including critical infrastructure entities and state, local, territorial, and tribal (SLLT) government organizations, to review them to improve their incident and vulnerability response practices.

"The playbooks we are releasing today are intended to improve and standardize the approaches used by federal agencies to identify, remediate, and recover from vulnerabilities and incidents affecting their systems," said Matt Hartman, Deputy Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity.

"We encourage our public and private sector partners to review the playbooks to take stock of their own vulnerability and incident response practices."

Further information on the two playbooks released by CISA on Tuesday can be found here (PDF).