Ignatius “Buck” Liberto, director of cybersecurity risk management and compliance at the office of the chief information officer at the Department of Energy, discussed how DOE has shifted from a perimeter security approach to zero trust to better protect sensitive data and critical facilities from cyberthreats, according to an article published Saturday in Forbes.
“At some point we got very wise, we the federal government, and said stop,” Buck said in a podcast.
“We need to make this a ‘deny all allow by exception’, and that certainly helped out a lot as we moved forward. And that’s really part of the zero trust architecture at an enterprise level and not at an enclave or lower level and enterprise level,” he added.
Buck said adopting zero trust will require DOE to advance innovation, partner with vendors and launch an education program that could help meet security goals.
He highlighted the need for a training awareness program and importance of adopting emerging technologies to help DOE improve its incident response capabilities.
“Network engineers and security defenders doing their job checking the logs looking for the anomalies is machine learning is automation helping absolutely when you look at the progression of just intrusion protection systems and next generation firewalls,” Buck noted.
“From a technology standpoint, we’re certainly helping so we’re looking for those anomalies that will then trigger alerts that will help the defenders,” he added.