Much of Kirstjen Nielsen’s tenure focused on DHS’s role as an emerging partner to local electoral offices, companies and other agencies throughout the U.S. It’s a tenuous public-private relationship that can’t exist, by design, between other government agencies like the National Security Agency or CIA and U.S. corporations, nor with the cyber functions in branches of the armed forces.
Those agencies have access to threat data that is typically classified, making it difficult to share with the private sector. But DHS, alongside counterparts in the Secret Service and FBI, have been trying to set up a variety of programs to combat this disconnect.
It was a role for which Nielsen was especially well-suited. She has a background in both cybersecurity and private sector risk, a rarity for a public official at that level of government, where having ten years or more of cybersecurity experience almost always involves military service. She spent nearly seven years on the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at D.C.’s George Washington University, a strategic think tank, and she previously worked on risk and resiliency initiatives at the World Economic Forum.
She presided over a DHS that made real progress in convincing state attorneys general to collaborate on sharing threat information on elections hacking.
She oversaw the launch of a re-named internal agency, known as CISA or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The agency is meant to assist in defending the computer network of civilian organizations, and will continue to be overseen by Christopher Krebs, who was appointed to head it in June 2018.
from Viral News Reports http://bit.ly/2U1x22U
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