The Dhs Cybersecurity Mission

Today, the subcommittee will examine the relationship between the Department of Homeland Security and the owners and operators of critical infrastructure. What is working well, what could be done better, and how to improve in the future. Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7, issued on December 17, 2003 outlines our National policy for Federal departments and agencies to partner with the private sector to identify and prioritize United States critical infrastructure and key resources and to protect them from terrorist attacks. The Secretary of Homeland Security was given the responsibility for ''coordinating the overall National effort to enhance the protection of the critical infrastructure,'' whether owned and operated by the public or private sector. With the private sector owning more than 80% of the Nation's critical infrastructure, the DHS-Private Sector relationship is crucial.

The DHS cybersecurity mission : promoting innovation and securing critical infrastructure : hearing before the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies of the Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, April 15, 2011.

Cybersecurity refers to three things: measures to protect information technology; the information it contains, processes, and transmits, and associated physical and virtual elements (which together comprise cyberspace); the degree of protection resulting from application of those measures; and the associated field of professional endeavor. Virtually any element of cyberspace can be at risk, and the degree of interconnection of those elements can make it difficult to determine the extent of the cybersecurity framework that is needed. Identifying the major weaknesses in U.S. cybersecurity is an area of some controversy; the defense against attacks on computer systems and associated infrastructure has appeared to be generally fragmented and varying widely in effectiveness.