Building trust with the private sector and improving information sharing are top priorities for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new chief cybersecurity official. 

DHS Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, National Protection and Programs Directorate, Phyllis Schneck said on Nov. 25 the federal government needs to start sharing information in better ways before it finds itself in an uphill battle against an adversary.

“There has to be a way,” Schneck said at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) DC chapter lunch in Arlington, Va. “The enemy shares information and if we don’t, which we don’t so much right now, we’re at this ridiculous disadvantage.” 

Schneck started her position Sept. 9, she said, after serving as vice president and chief technology officer for the global public sector at McAfee, where she was responsible for the technical vision for products and service for the public sector as well as global threat intelligence, industrial control system security and telecom strategy.

The Obama administration has begun to further strengthen information sharing between the public and private sectors around cyber security threats and vulnerabilities. The administration, with significant input from the private sector, is creating a framework of existing best security and business practices that could be voluntarily adopted by critical infrastructures to boost their cyber security posture. The administration is also exploring incentives to boost the adoption of these standards and practices. 

“(How we share intelligence) is something I would worry about most,” Schneck said. “This is something we have control to fix.”

One goal of the framework, Schneck said, should help small and medium-sized businesses identify important assets to protect. Schneck also said helping create resiliency in small business infrastructures is key as those businesses could be creating the next great jet engine.

Schneck said part of building trust is trusting in your people. By the time a cyber event occurs, Schneck said, it’s not a good time to be going through your contacts list. Schneck also urged cyber professionals to build trust on the expertise side and on the law enforcement side. 

Innovation, Schneck said, also needs to become a hallmark of cyber security going forward. Schneck said the financial sector has done an “amazing job” in adopting protocols to be able to send security indicators and that DHS is hoping the market will drive this kind of innovation.

“It’s about the human to human trust and machine to machine trust,” Schneck said “Sometimes milliseconds are what you need to be able to stop something.”

McAfee is a division of Intel Corp. [INTC]