It's a conglomerate that operates in every field of endeavor imaginable. One 'division' may be the world's largest 'conglomerate' itself: It employs over 1M people, has endless internal divisions, has global 24/7 operations, and an ~ $800B budget. With that budget, I would guess that their assets are worth more than Apple's market cap.
There's not a single CIO who can dicate 'we're blocking Facebook - get to work people!'.
Example: "Help organizations safely use AI to advance cybersecurity."
How do you measure this? What does this even mean? What does success look like if this is achieved?
CISA has a lot more sway than you'd think in how businesses operate from a security point of view.
Being this broad allows for some more latitude by the businesses / sectors following these guidelines. But they certainly could've been more thorough in their approach without much push back.
All I see are watered down checklists that can be verified by any human being who is semi-literate and may or may not have any relevance to security best practices. They probably were influenced on some level by CISA guidance if you're talking about .gov or commercial entities, but is nowhere near the level of impact you mentioned.
Do you have any examples of CISA guidelines having a meaningful impact on business operations?
From the hypothetical scenarios detailed after the Texas winter shutdown a few years ago, this rule sounds unhinged from reality without mucho mucho dollars. Up to an including spare power plant(s) "just in case" a black start would be required.
I could believe it takes multiple hours just to fully start a single coal plant. Let alone align the frequencies across multiple stations in the grid.
You just plain aren't going to do that in an hour when you're offline because someone trashed your automated systems - resetting and restoring the grid would require people on site, in communication. That's not happening in an hour without staggering expense.
So at the top, all the leaders are just trolling the populace.
One big concern that hasn't been well addressed is the interaction between natural gas infrastructure and electrical power generation. The 2021 Texas outage made this clear. "Five times more natural gas than wind power had been lost. When power was cut, it disabled some compressors that push gas through pipelines, knocking out further gas plants due to lack of supply."[2] If more of the Texas grid had gone down (it was close), it would have taken far longer to restart. Especially with frozen water in the pipelines. Nuclear, coal, hydro, solar, and wind plants have their own local fuel supply, but natural gas plants usually do not. The pipeline system and compressors need to be brought up first. This is especially a concern after the 2021 pipeline ransomware attack.[3]
PJM's internal 2019 study has concerns about this.[4]
[1] https://protectourpower.org
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Pipeline_ransomware_a...
[4] https://www.pjm.com/-/media/committees-groups/committees/oc/...
Every Factorio player knows you never power your generator pumps with the primary power source
Even better would be to onshore production of such items with bonuses for demonstrating ability to rapidly scale manufacturing.
Small addition:
Systems which handle other people's money... ==> Systems which track other people's money or possessions exceeding $x in value individually or $y in total...
(e.g. real estate, insurance policies, ...)
On a more general note, the same thing goes for a lot of centralisation efforts backed by technology ("Digitalisation", as it is called here in the EU), it's akin to building highways pointing straight from the border to your country's capital city and to your vital industries, all this while your very dangerous neighbour has a big tank army. Of course, tech-focused agencies like the CISA will never go against the process of digitalisation per se.
> Identify risks that can kill people.
While we are imagining things people are more likely to die from excess sugar intake, alcohol, or driving on a freeway than in military combat or from some "hacker". Those are huge risks costing more lives than a holocaust and at much greater expense. We need to isolate these systems.
Talking about security with software developers who have never worked in security reminds of talking about performance. These things are like opinions. Everybody has opinions and most people become emotionally invested in their opinions as though their Monopoly money were something other than artificial. Usually though there is no actual investment of time, money, or professional experience in any of this. An outside observer might refer to this by colorful language.
If you want your opinions on security (or performance) to be more than bullshit... write some software to solve for some part of this.
This is mostly in place, and has been for a while. Not so much “people’s” money, more for the banks money, which is where the systemic risk resides.
* Identify risks that can kill people. Strongly isolate systems where risk exists. Assume a hostile capability at the StuxNet level.
* Beef up black start capability for energy grids, so that in the event of a major failure, power is 90% back up in an hour. Test this annually.
* Stock up on long lead time items, especially HV grid transformers.
* Systems which handle other people's money must have continuous backups to write-once media and be able to 99% recover from a total loss of online data within 24 hours.
* Telecommunications systems must be capable of a cold restart from a known good state for 90% of users within one hour, 99% within 24 hours.