The Department of Homeland Security is funding a grant for researchers to study vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure in the U.S.
The funding comes on the heels of a cyber attack on a Florida water treatment plant, and the looming specter of hackers taking critical infrastructure offline.
From Grants.gov:
The nature of the cybersecurity threat to America is growing, and our nation’s cyber adversaries move with speed and stealth. To keep pace, SLTT agencies need to be able to identify, categorize, and prioritize their HVAs in order to protect these assets from compromise, subsequently protecting HVAs that are so critical to an organization that the loss of access or corruption of these assets would have serious impact to the organization’s ability to perform its mission or conduct business.
Key to this effort, SLTT jurisdictions require guidelines, templates, and tools to facilitate implementation of these processes within the context of their own risk management framework, available resources, and authorities.
The purpose of this Cooperative Agreement is to establish a HVA pilot that aligns with the Federal Government’s HVA programs and is flexible enough to be implemented by SLTT jurisdictions based on their individual requirements. The outcomes of this cooperative agreement will provide standardized methods for the identification, categorization, and prioritization of high value assets, and provide guidance, templates, and tools to mitigate risk associated with identified vulnerabilities.
by CivMetrics Staff | Apr 28, 2021