The new initiative aims to provide organizations with unprecedented levels of information and context with an initial focus on ransomware and incident response for cloud providers.

Jen Easterly, the freshly installed head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), unveiled yesterday a new federal initiative called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) which has been structured to help lead the development of the country’s cyber defense plans. The JCDC aims to bring together the public and private sectors in a joint planning capacity to tackle cyber readiness and threats.

CISA’s announcement of the JCDC states that it will “bring together public and private sector entities to unify deliberate and crisis action planning while coordinating the integrated execution of these plans.”  The hope is that the plans will “promote national resilience by coordinating actions to identify, protect against, detect, and respond to malicious cyber activity targeting US critical infrastructure or national interests.”

The West Point-trained Easterly has a long career in the government, having served in the military, at US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency (NSA), and as senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. She also served a stint as head of global cybersecurity at Morgan Stanley. Speaking at the Black Hat conference, she appealed to the industry to help CISA refine the JCDC’s products to be more valuable and helpful.

Easterly relied on her military background to underscore the importance of planning in cybersecurity. “You got to plan in peacetime to prepare for wartime,” she said.

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