Divergent strategies moving forward: The road ahead appears paved with opportunity for Cairncross, while Plankey faces a narrower path of contraction and clean-up at CISA.”This is a perfect opportunity for the NCD [national cyber director] position to work,” Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation’s Montgomery said. “You have a National Security Council focused on the offensive side. You have CISA, which is focused on internally reorganizing itself. Cairncross is the first NCD to find himself in the position of having the running room to make the job work.”Montgomery emphasized, “Now is the time for Cairncross to very pointedly and aggressively go work to establish the NCD’s role as the coordinator of domestic cyber incident response to ensure that federal agencies are executing the president’s policies and budget and appropriations properly, and to work with the Hill to get whatever authority and appropriation changes are needed.”Plankey, on the other hand, is going to have to look inward to reorganize a reduced and demoralized agency. “He’s not going to be able to change the administration’s mind in the short term about reducing the overall size of CISA,” Cyber Threat Alliance’s Daniel said. “That’s not going to happen. He’s going to have to take that as a given.”Daniel advised, “He should try to say [to the President], ‘Okay, give me the latitude to get to the targets you want, but let me work with the CISA leadership. Let me work with [Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem]. Let me figure out how to get there.’”One certainty for both agencies is that “neither of them is going to get the opportunity to fix the influence operations problem,” Montgomery said. “We have China, Russia, and Iran running aggressive influence operations against us. For whatever reason, the Trump administration has decided that it’s censorship of Republicans. That is a false analogy, but it’s taken root. Not much we can do about it.”Despite the sunny prospects for Cairncross and the hope that Plankey can stop CISA’s downward spiral, it’s also clear that the current government’s cybersecurity policy environment is uncharted territory. “It’s a very, very different environment than anybody that’s been working in cyber for the last 20 years has faced,” Daniel said. “We haven’t seen a government or private sector company that has said, ‘We’re going to walk away from a lot of the cyber capability and disinvest in it and abandon that capability.’ We just haven’t seen that.”
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