Weekly Roundup
Feb 13 – Feb 19 2015

Almost two years after his last cybersecurity-related executive order, President Barack Obama signed a new order in Silicon Valley this week in an effort to further push for information sharing between government and private industry.
Under the new directive, government agencies and businesses would exchange cyber threat information with each other through a network of industry hubs.
The Department of Homeland Security would also be required to develop a set of voluntary guidelines and privacy standards for the Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations.
This move occurred one day after Sen. Thomas Carper introduced to Congress a bill that would authorize companies to share threat indicators with DHS’ National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center and other federal agencies.
For a third piece of federal cyber news this week, the Office of Management and Budget said it would form a new oversight office that will work to help institutionalize and standardize how agencies defend their networks.
In our media staff’s conversations with leaders at GovCon firms, many of these executives have pointed to such collaboration between the public and private sectors as key in efforts to stay on top of a changing cyber landscape.
Tony Cole, global government CTO at FireEye and a Wash100 inductee, described to ExecutiveBiz in February 2014 some of the reasons why he believes these partnerships can help with information sharing.
“We need to share indicators of compromise with governments, and they need to share them with industry as well to ensure that a threat they see is automatically rolled into commercial products.”
“Those same organizations rely on commercial products so an indicator of compromise automatically shared with commercial security companies will be able to more quickly protect other government organizations and also companies.”

The Potomac Officers Club will turn its attention on March 19 to the cybersecurity arena with “2015 Cyber Security Summit,” a half-day forum for government and business leaders to interact and exchange ideas for how to protect information systems.
Loss of trade secrets and customer information, capabilities of nation-states, public-private partnerships to tackle those issues and U.S. government policies are among several topics slated for discussion at the summit.
Speakers scheduled to appear include:

• Joe Demarest, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division
• Curtis Dukes, director of information assurance at NSA
• Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center
• Phil Lacombe, VP & manager of Parsons’ information systems and security sector
• Tom McMillan, a director at Siemens Government Technologies
• Steve Shirley, executive director of the Defense Cyber Crime Center
• Mark Weatherford, former deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at DHS

Click here to register for this event and learn more about POC’s other upcoming events.