Efforts in the federal government and Congress to identify and further protect groups critical to national security from cyber threats are gaining ground amid recent destructive ransomware attacks, officials say.<\/p>\n
New program:<\/strong>\u00a0Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly said Friday that her agency has kicked off an effort to identify \u201cprimary systemically important entities\u201d to be protected from threats, often those critical to national continuity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are prototyping a variety of different approaches in our National Risk Management Center\u2026to try and start identifying those entities that are in fact systemically important, and we are doing it based on economic centrality, network centrality, and logical dominance in the national critical functions,\u201d Easterly said during a virtual event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).<\/p>\n CISA\u2019s efforts to identify organizations to further protect come as the nation continues to face a wave of ransomware attacks that have, at times, destabilized key supply chains. These have included the ransomware attack in May on Colonial Pipeline, which led to gas shortages in multiple states for over a week.<\/p>\n \u201cRansomware, truly a scourge that is affecting all of our lives every day,\u201d Easterly said Friday.<\/p>\n