NOTE: We were going to publish our second blog of the S4x23 SBOM Challenge today. However, the new National Cybersecurity Strategy was released this morning, and we thought that dissecting it for our readers took priority. We’ll go back to the S4x23 SBOM Challenge discussion next week.

There is a lot to unpack and there is even more to read between lines in the Biden Administration's new National Cybersecurity Strategy. Let me lay out the three...

Today, reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Eric Geller at Politico published a story: “BlackBerry resisted announcing major flaw in software powering cars, hospital equipment.”  They outline how BlackBerry willfully hid the fact that their key operating system QNX contained a collection of vulnerabilities (originally discovered and named BadAlloc by Microsoft). It seems other companies affected by BadAlloc announced the issue way back in May. Not so...

Section 3 - Less Fog, More Cloud

Section 3: Modernizing Federal Government Cybersecurity of the Executive Order is all about government agencies moving to the cloud and doing it right. If you are someone who believes that the cloud has absolutely no place in the industrial control systems (ICS) world, you are going to hate this section.

So you don’t sell to the Feds…

Today’s blog is going to take a break from analyzing a specific section of the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and focus on who will be impacted by the order.

I got thinking about this last week when Tom Clary posted this insightful comment on LinkedIn:

[This] Executive Order in no way compels private sector critical infrastructure to do anything different. It seems intended to better protect...

Removing Barriers to Sharing Threat Information

On Friday we dissected Section 4: Enhancing Software Supply Chain Security of the new Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. Today we will look at Section 2: Removing Barriers to Sharing Threat Information. We’ve also updated the EO14028 Timeline I posted previously to include Section 2 deadlines:

Late Wednesday night President Biden signed the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.  

Compared to any Executive Order (EO) I’ve seen, this is a massive and complex policy document: the average length of an EO has been under 3½ pages; most are just 1 or 2 pages. This EO weighs in at 18 pages with 74 actionable directives. Forty-five of those directives have defined due dates, many linked to the completion of other directives....