Prepare, Protect, Respond
Brian Harrell is Assistant Director at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: Tell us what your role is.
Brian Harrell: I am the Assistant Director at CISA, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. While the name is relatively new, we've been around a long time. We're formerly known as the National Protection of Programs Directorate or NPPD, which was a headquarters function within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In November 2018, we finally became an operational component within DHS, so that has given us a lot of operational autonomy and some authorities to engage private industry to do physical security, cybersecurity, emergency management, and some of those aspects of response and recovery. I was appointed by the President to be the sixth Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection in November, prior to the agency name change.
In terms of our role for cybersecurity with the electricity industry, first and foremost, we work closely with the sector specific agency, which in this case is the Department of Energy. I work with Assistant Secretary Karen Evans, my counterpart.