Office of information security

Last week, US Federal energy regulatory commission officially announced the creation of a new office that will concentrates its efforts on information security. This new office, under the Commission jurisdiction will be responsible for:

• Providing leadership on information security
• Assist the commission on information security challenges
• Indentify, comunicate and research solutions to cyber and physical security problems

The office will therefore have to act in coordination with other agencies and organisation in need for the office services. The main objective of the new office will be to provide security expertise in order to protect critical energy infrastructures in the US. Given this, the office will have to operate in a vast number of scenarios including: intelligence gathering and direct user interaction.

What does this means?

We probably won't be feeling the impact of the new office soon but one thing is sure, observing US government maneuvers in order to secure its critical energy infrastructure and avoid easily avoidable security breach before they happen is quite interesting. Those maneuvers includes catastrophe scenarios that were studied during the summer. This is no common thing in security and could realy be a game changer. It's also interesting to see official regulatory forces choose open collaboration in cyber security cases as this is asked for by many professionals in computer security field. Lastly it mainly shows us how governing bodies are changing the way they think about what could be the biggest threat right now: Information security.