US Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem Details Cyber Strategy

The Trump administration will continue to work with international partners to combat cybercrime, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem pledged Tuesday during a keynote speech at the RSAC Conference in San Francisco.

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“Cybersecurity is national security,” she told the audience. The administration’s first 100 days – which also fell on Tuesday – saw funding and headcount cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a DHS component. President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum on April 9 ordering a review into former Chris Krebs, the CISA head who during the first Trump administration countered a false narrative of a stolen 2020 election (see: Targeted by Trump, Chris Krebs Resigns Job to Fight Probe).

In a speech detailing “her vision for the future of America’s cyberdefense” Noem pledged to work more closely with industry, although said the government expected to see products built to be secure by design, at no extra cost.

She also said the government would continue cybercrime-combating initiatives – including working with Interpol – and tackle nation-state threats by tearing down existing silos, including across intelligence agencies.

“Our goal is to use our maximum effect of cooperation to make sure that we’re going after bad actors, and we’ve seen examples of cyberespionage like Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon that have been very effective against us,” she said, referencing Microsoft designations for Beijing-backed efforts to penetrate U.S. critical infrastructure for eavesdropping and prepositioning purposes.

The U.S. Senate on Jan. 25 confirmed Noem as secretary of DHS. For the six years prior, she served as the governor of South Dakota, during which time she was the only governor to reject federal cybersecurity grant funding for her state.

Speaking at RSAC, three months into her DHS tenure, Noem dismissed what she characterized as being unwarranted criticism of the Trump administration’s decision to disband multiple unpaid advisory groups comprised of industry experts, including CISA’s Technical Advisory Council and the Cyber Safety Review Board.

In their place, she promised “much more responsive” approaches. “Instead of just talking about cybersecurity, we’re going to do it,” she said, telling attendees that the cybersecurity community will “have a seat at the table that’ll be much bigger,” in pursuit of new public-private partnerships designed to ensure “that there’s consequences in place for bad actors.” She also suggested that prior domestic cybersecurity shortcomings stemmed in part from a lack of focus.

“DHS is committed to cybersecurity,” she said. “I’m committed to cybersecurity, as is the president, recognizing it’s a national security imperative responsibility that rests on our shoulders.”

As evidence of the administration’s commitment to cybersecurity and industry dialog, she said that DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar, and Trump’s nominee to head CISA, Sean Plankey, have also been attending this year’s RSAC and meeting with members of the cybersecurity community.

DHS Expects Secure by Design

In her speech, Noem called on the industry to embrace secure by design principles, and promised that the U.S. government would use its purchasing power to make that happen (see: Senior CISA Advisers Announce Exits Amid Federal Downsizing ).

“We’ll be enforcing provisions that demand security at the outset,” she said. “We’re not going to be paying for security add-ons that should have already been in the software to begin with, it should have been in the product that we’re buying and we’re no longer going to be paying for extra dollars and taxpayer dollars to rectify security lapses that never should have occurred in the first place.”

Noem called on the cybersecurity community to collaborate with the government. “I want to work with you to make sure that we’re not becoming a burdensome regulation on our private sector, but that we’re working with you to make sure that we have products out there that truly do protect this nation’s future,” she said.

The DHS chief also appealed to the cybersecurity community to help DHS be better at what it does. She called on the community to share ideas for how to refine the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which is due to expire in September unless Congress reauthorizes it. The law was designed to enhance threat intelligence coordination between federal and nonfederal entities. Noem said the administration is looking for ways to “streamline” current approaches, and wants to quickly issue presidential memos or executive orders to put them into practice, before codifying those changes in lawmakers’ next version of the legislation.

Signposting a Change in CISA’s Focus

Noem didn’t touch on either elections or election security. In 2017, then Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson designated election systems as being part of the U.S. critical infrastructure DHS was charged with protecting. Whether that still holds true isn’t clear, although budget cuts have led to what one former DHS official characterized as being the “effective demise” of multiple government efforts focused on ensuring election security (see: CISA Budget Cuts Weaken US Election Security, Officials Warn).

Noem did criticize the role CISA previously played in attempting to combat misinformation and disinformation campaigns. Such campaigns included Russian efforts designed to amplify and distort the novel coronavirus outbreak to further Moscow’s geopolitical aims.

While saying CISA has been doing “important work,” Noem said “we also saw them get into areas that were not why they were created,” and said eliminating those efforts has already saved American taxpayers $10 million.

“They were deciding what is truth and what was not, and it’s not the job of CISA to be the Ministry of Truth,” she said.

A long-time Trump ally, Noem gained national prominence after she refused during the coronavirus pandemic to mandate that residents of the very rural state – with a population of only 900,000 – wear masks in public.

Noem promised to find new efficiencies in how DHS approaches cybersecurity. “We’re preparing for our future. We’re focused on not having overlapping technologies. We’re going to harness artificial intelligence, standardize the use of advanced encryption to further secure our systems and we’re investing significant resources, which you will see soon in the coming days, when the president has his proposal in his budget going forward in our interactions with Congress that will ensure that America remains the global leader in technology, information and innovation,” she said.

Noem said a revamped CISA would be put “back on mission” by focusing its efforts on “federal civilian network defense,” including supporting small and medium-size businesses, critical infrastructure and to “provide guidance” to state and local government.

Noem previewed federal advice to states that they partner much more closely with their National Guard units to help respond to cybersecurity incidents, and pledged to share “threat information and mitigation guidance in a much more direct way” with them. “One of the communications I just sent to all of the governors in this country is that they all need a SCIF,” she said, referring to a sensitive compartmented information facility designed to block eavesdropping attempts aimed to obtaining classified information. Not having such a capability hampers states’ ability to respond to cybersecurity incidents in “a quick and efficient way,” she said.