Slashdot Mirror
The Trials and Tribulations of America's Chief Internet Defender (dailydot.com)
erier2003 writes: Amid a torrent of cyberattacks and seemingly endless data breaches, the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team, the government's premier cybersecurity monitoring unit, has never been busier. In an interview with the Daily Dot, US-CERT Director Ann Barron-DiCamillo described its structure, its incident-response activities, and its partnerships with frequently targeted industries like the financial sector. She also discussed the evolution of cyber threats over the past decade, as determined hackers have shifted focus from brute-force network penetrations to savvier, more indirect attacks.
CERT has existed long before DHS and has been doing an excellent job of informing the US industry of threats to systems
CERT and SANS should be the primary go-to place for anybody sticking their toes into the cold water of computer systems security
This article is about US-CERT, not CERT.
Half the government is part of DHS. This is because during discussions of what went wrong systemically after 9/11, noone would agree who should be the lead agency on terrorism. Everybody agreed coordination was needed, and everybody thought they should be the lead.
The FBI , border patrol, everybody wanted to keep their own autonomy and didn't want to be put under another agency or department's leadership. So Andrew Card (the guy who whispered the news of the 9/11 "plane crashes" to Bush in the famous video) gathered a bunch of people in White House basement to figure out the politics. Trying to find a way of organizing things where coordination would be -possible- which wouldn't be doa due to turf wars, they decided anybody and everybody having anything to do with security would be lumped together under a brand-new department.
Source: personal conversation with Andrew Card
US-CERT does not have a vulnerability analysis capability. That's why they contract that work out to Carnegie Mellon University. I work for CERT, so I'm pretty sure that I would know.