The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has earmarked $650 million from its American Rescue Plan Act funding to transition its EINSTEIN threat intelligence system to various programs, FedScoop reported Thursday.
Brandon Wales, acting director of CISA, said at a hearing with the Senate Homeland Security Committee that the agency is prioritizing efforts to detect suspicious activity on networks handling unencrypted data to enable faster response to supply chain attacks.
CISA is also partnering with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on streamlining the federal government's contracting process and allocating ARP funding for endpoint detection capabilities as well as other tools to rapidly prevent anomalous behavior from entering networks, noted Wales.
The agency is additionally working to complete the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) effort’s phases one and two which are slated to conclude in 2021, according to Wales.
“There’s a lot that we need to do through the federal contracting process to ensure that the vendors providing IT products and services for the federal government have the appropriate level of cybersecurity in place, based upon the information and their place within the networks that they are supporting,” he said.