President Trump’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) released recommendations and an implementation plan in a Dec. 10 report to the President for the creation of a Critical Infrastructure Command Center (CICC) that would be pair government and private sector experts to improve cybersecurity for critical infrastructure sectors.
“The cyber threats facing the Nation’s most critical infrastructure require real-time collaboration between government and industry,” the NIAC report says. “We must move beyond sharing intelligence to acting on it together.”
NIAC first recommended the creation of CICC in December 2019, then spent nine months working on the implementation plan. The report states that gaps between government and the private sector in intelligence sharing put critical infrastructure at risk and the new implantation plan would help cut those risks by better operationalizing “intelligence in a classified space.”
The CICC would be responsible for identifying and sharing information related to cybersecurity threats in real-time and then creating procedures to mitigate the potential damage. It would also create an information-sharing pipeline flowing both ways between the intelligence community and the private sector, as well as assessing vulnerabilities and monitoring active cybersecurity threats.
“Existing intelligence sharing between government and industry does not move at the speed required to prevent, mitigate, or respond to the most serious cyber threats to the most critical infrastructure systems,” the report says.
NIAC’s action plan includes recommendations and action items that would have the CICC up and operational within 180 days. The operation would not require new office facilities, it said.
