The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in early September selected the Univ. of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) to lead an effort with various stakeholders to identify a common set of voluntary standards or guidelines for the creation and functioning of new cyber security information sharing organizations as outlined by a presidential executive order earlier this year.
As the Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAO) Standards Organization, UTSA will lead a team that includes the Logistics Management Institute and the Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center. UTSA will receive an annual $2 million grant that could be renewed for up to five years.
The executive order issued by President Barack Obama in February establishes ISAOs that “will serve as focal points for cybersecurity information sharing and collaboration within the private sector and between the private sector and government,” Andy Ozment, assistant secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at DHS, said in a White House Blog post on Sept. 3. He added that “In encouraging the rapid creation of ISAOs, the Executive Order expands information sharing by encouraging the formation of communities that share information not just within a sector but across a region or in response to a specific emerging cyber threat.”
UTSA was selected through a competitive process managed by DHS.
“This is an incredible win for UTSA,” Greg White, who will lead the school’s ISAO efforts, said in a statement. “This is the single organization in the nation that will be creating the national standards for sharing and analyzing information in cybersecurity as directed by the White House.”
The ISAOs can be non-profit organizations or even companies that share information among partners or customers. They can also be existing Information Sharing and Analysis Centers that exist for critical infrastructure and other sectors of the United States economy.
DHS is the primary portal for the sharing of cyber threat data between the private and public sectors. Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday that the government “is actually developing an architecture for the delivery of a prioritization scheme and developing criteria that will help us within the government decide how best we collectively should respond to a particular incident and the consequences of each stream are sometimes distinct.”