SolarWinds (S. Hrg. 117-478, March 18, 2021)
Summary
Senate Hearing 117-478, SolarWinds, prints hearings of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs: "Understanding and Responding to the SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack: The Federal Perspective" on March 18, 2021 and a May 11, 2021 hearing on improving federal cybersecurity post-SolarWinds. Gary C. Peters, Chairman of the Committee, presides. The March 18 witnesses are Christopher DeRusha of the Office of Management and Budget, Brandon Wales of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Tonya Ugoretz of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On May 11 the witnesses are Brandon Wales, Ryan A. Higgins of the U.S. Department of Commerce and Janet Vogel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Chairman Peters cites nearly $2 billion in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act for federal information technology systems and cybersecurity.
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[Senate Hearing 117-478]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 117-478
SOLARWINDS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 18, 2021, UNDERSTANDING AND RESPONDING TO THE
SOLARWINDS SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK: THE FEDERAL
PERSPECTIVE AND
MAY 11, 2021, PREVENTION, RESPONSE, AND RECOVERY: IMPROVING
FEDERAL CYBERSECURITY POST-SOLARWINDS
__________
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
44-785 PDF WASHINGTON : 2022
COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
GARY C. PETERS, Michigan, Chairman
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona RAND PAUL, Kentucky
JACKY ROSEN, Nevada JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
ALEX PADILLA, California MITT ROMNEY, Utah
JON OSSOFF, Georgia RICK SCOTT, Florida
JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
David M. Weinberg, Staff Director
Zachary I. Schram, Chief Counsel
Christopher J. Mulkins, Director of Homeland Security
Celeste M. Chamberlain, Congressional Fellow
Pamela Thiessen, Minority Staff Director
Andrew Dockham, Minority Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director
Patrick T. Warren, Minority Investigative Counsel
William H.W. McKenna, Minority Chief Investigator
Cara G. Mumford, Minority Professional Staff Member
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Thomas J. Spino, Hearing Clerk
C O N T E N T S
------
Opening statements:
Page
Senator Peters............................................... 1, 75
Senator Portman...............................................3, 77
Senator Carper...............................................15, 90
Senator Hassan...............................................18, 95
Senator Rosen...............................................21, 100
Senator Romney............................................... 23
Senator Sinema............................................... 27
Senator Hawley..............................................29, 106
Senator Padilla.............................................. 31
Senator Ossoff............................................... 33
Senator Johnson.............................................. 92
Senator Lankford............................................. 97
Prepared statements:
Senator Peters..............................................37, 111
Senator Portman.............................................39, 113
WITNESSES
Thursday, March 18, 2021
Christopher DeRusha, Federal Chief Information Security Officer,
Office of Management and Budget................................ 5
Brandon Wales, Acting Director, Cybersecurity and Information
Security Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.......... 7
Tonya Ugoretz, Deputy Assistant Director, Cyber Readiness,
Outreach, and Intelligence Branch, Federal Bureau of
Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice...................... 9
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
DeRusha, Christopher:
Testimony.................................................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 42
Ugoretz, Tonya:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 53
Wales, Brandon:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 47
APPENDIX
Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record:
Mr. DeRusha.................................................. 58
Mr. Wales.................................................... 59
Ms. Ugoretz.................................................. 72
WITNESSES
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Brandon Wales, Acting Director, Cybersecurity and Information
Security Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.......... 79
Ryan A. Higgins, Chief Information Security Officer, U.S.
Department of Commerce......................................... 82
Janet Vogel, Chief Information Security Officer, U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services................................... 84
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Higgins, Ryan A.:
Testimony.................................................... 82
Prepared statement........................................... 123
Vogel, Janet:
Testimony.................................................... 84
Prepared statement........................................... 126
Wales, Brandon:
Testimony.................................................... 79
Prepared statement........................................... 117
UNDERSTANDING AND RESPONDING TO THE
SOLARWINDS SUPPLY CHAIN ATTACK: THE FEDERAL PERSPECTIVE
----------
THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:15 a.m., via
Webex and in room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon.
Gary C. Peters, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Peters, Carper, Hassan, Sinema, Rosen,
Padilla, Ossoff, Portman, Romney, and Hawley.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN PETERS\1\
Chairman Peters. This Committee hearing will come to order,
and I would like to first off thank our witnesses for joining
us today and for their service to the American people.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appear in the Appendix
on page 37.
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This hearing will examine the devastating impact of recent
cyber attacks against our Federal networks, including the dire
national security implications of last year's SolarWinds breach
and other recent online espionage efforts.
This was one of the most destructive cyber breaches in
American history, and there are still many unanswered questions
about how it happened and how it went undetected for far too
long.
Both the SolarWinds and recent Microsoft hacks clearly show
that our Nation is not adequately prepared to tackle this
persistent and grave threat.
Foreign adversaries, like China and Russia, continue to
exploit our cyber vulnerabilities to access confidential and
classified information, disrupt government operations, and even
target businesses, schools and critical infrastructure. Unless
our capabilities are able to match this threat that we face,
American networks and supply chains remain at risk.
Last year's SolarWinds hack and the subsequent breach of
Federal systems was incredibly sophisticated, and the extent of
the damage is astounding. We must prevent an espionage effort
like this from ever happening again and ensure that our
government has the resources to calibrate our response to these
significant threats.
After the SolarWinds hack, likely perpetrated by the
Russian government, our agencies were asked to self-analyze and
review the effects of the attack when many did not have the
capability to do so. This haphazard approach made it extremely
clear that our ability to respond did not match the severity of
the crisis.
The process and procedures for responding to cyber attacks
desperately needs to be modernized, including improving the
Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), which
has not been updated since the creation of the Department of
Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (DHS CISA).
In order to adapt to the evolving cybersecurity threat,
both the public and private sector need a centralized,
transparent, and streamlined process for sharing information.
In the event of future attacks, this will be critical to
mitigating the damage.
This discussion, with our government's foremost cyber
experts, will be critical to understanding how agencies are
assessing the damage done by these breaches and what actions
they took to notify Congress.
Going forward, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will
play a critical role in strengthening our cyber defenses and
the security of our Federal systems and our supply chains.
Mr. DeRusha, as the Federal Chief Information Security
Officer (CISO), you are charged with implementing and
coordinating these efforts. Based on your strong record in my
home State of Michigan and your extensive experience, I have
every confidence that you are up to the task.
I have long raised concerns about the national security
threat posed by cyber attacks, but those challenges just seem
to continue to grow. The pandemic has pushed more of our lives
and communities online, and foreign adversaries and other bad
actors continue to target the networks of our research
institutions and health systems, threatening our ongoing
pandemic response.
That is precisely why, as a part of the American Rescue
Plan (ARP) Act, I helped secure nearly $2 billion to update our
aging Federal information technology (IT) systems and help
address cybersecurity threats. However, it is clear from the
gravity of this threat that we need to examine whether CISA,
the FBI, and other agencies have what they need to protect the
American people.
I am committed to working on a bipartisan basis with my
colleagues on the Committee, especially Ranking Member Portman,
and with the Biden administration, to protect our networks
against future breaches. This hearing is the first of several
that we are going to be holding on this issue. We must tackle
this problem. We must do it swiftly, but we must also do it
comprehensively.
Thank you, and with that, I will turn it over to Ranking
Member Portman for his opening remarks.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN\1\
Senator Portman. Thank you, Chairman Peters, and I have
appreciated our bipartisan work on these issues, even before
you sat in the chair and I was Ranking Member. We have much
more to do, clearly.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Portman appears in the
Appendix on page 39.
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We are here today to focus on this massive SolarWinds hack,
I believe, in the history of our country. We need to analyze
its impact on the Federal Government and discuss what changes
are necessary to prevent and mitigate attacks like this in the
future.
It has been three months since we learned of this attack,
and there is still a lot, frankly, that remains unknown. We
will learn more today, I hope. What we do know is really
chilling.
First, according to the FBI, the attackers were ``likely
Russian in origin.'' That is a quote from them and our
intelligence services as well. They were also smart and hard to
detect, apparently. They were patient; they were careful about
selecting their targets. They disguised their activity and used
stealth techniques that evaded detection. Because of that, it
took over a year to detect the attack--a lifetime to do damage
for sophisticated adversaries like these.
Second, we know that the attackers used a trusted software
company, a supplier, to attack the U.S. Government. The attack
compromised a security update or a ``patch'' for the widely
used SolarWinds Orion IT management software. It is good cyber
hygiene to have a security patch updated, and, it is something
that we preach that those practices ought to be followed. Yet
applying those updates and security patches is exactly how this
hack occurred.
Here they used the security patch meant to better protect
against hacks to launch the attack. The attacker capitalized on
our assumption that these patches are safe to install. This
should be a wake-up call for all of us who are concerned about
our data being compromised.
Third, we know that this attack was broad. The Federal
Government, of course, was hit, we know that, but also the
private sector. Within the Federal Government, this attack hit
agencies that hold some of our most sensitive data and national
security secrets. Based on public sources, this includes the
State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the
National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Nuclear
Security Administration (NNSA), which is the agency charged
with maintaining our nuclear stockpile.
The SolarWinds attack also impacted the private sector,
even cybersecurity firms like FireEye, the company that
actually discovered the breach in its own systems. FireEye is
one of the firms folks call when they discover a breach. Here
the very people we call when we get hacked got hacked itself.
Fourth, we know that despite all the increased funding that
has been appropriated for cybersecurity--some of the
legislation that we have worked on here in this Committee--the
Federal Government never caught this attack.
The fact the Federal Government was hacked is not
surprising to me. In June 2019, as Chair of the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), I released a report with
Senator Carper detailing the extensive cybersecurity
vulnerabilities of eight different Federal agencies. Many of
these vulnerabilities had remained unresolved for a decade.
Over a year later, three of those agencies that we
highlighted in our report were seriously compromised by the
SolarWinds attack: DHS, State, and the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS). Those are just the three we
know of as of today. Unfortunately, this was not a big surprise
to us.
The SolarWinds attack was one of the most widespread and
consequential cyberattacks to date. In response, we have to
take a hard look at our Federal cybersecurity strategy. What
are we doing wrong? Why are our defense capabilities not up to
the task?
This includes the failures of the Federal Government's
front-line defense program called ``EINSTEIN.'' EINSTEIN has
cost approximately $6 billion and is supposed to detect and
prevent cyber intrusions at Federal agencies. Clearly, it was
not effective in stopping the SolarWinds breach or even
recognizing that it occurred. EINSTEIN's authorization expires
at the end of next year, so it is a good time to consider its
utility and how it can be improved.
Any cybersecurity legislation we consider needs to address
the broad set of risks facing our Federal networks and needs to
ensure there is proper expertise and accountability in the U.S.
Government. We will talk about that today and the legislation
that was recently passed to establish more accountability
within the Executive Office of the President (EOP). When those
networks are breached, as in the case of SolarWinds, there also
have to be consequences.
I appreciate the witnesses being here today. I appreciate
their service, and I look forward to their testimony on these
important questions and getting solid ideas as to how we can
better defend our Federal networks.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Portman.
It is the practice of the Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to swear in witnesses,
so if you will stand, please, and raise your right hand. Do you
swear that the testimony you will give before this Committee
will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you, God?
Mr. DeRusha. I do.
Mr. Wales. I do.
Ms. Ugoretz. I do.
Chairman Peters. You may be seated.
Our first witness today is Chris DeRusha. Mr. DeRusha is
the U.S. Government's Chief Information Security Officer within
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Prior to being named
Federal CISO, Mr. DeRusha was the Chief Security Officer for my
home State of Michigan. Mr. DeRusha also has over eight years
of Federal Government experience working at the White House and
the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He served as a Senior
Cybersecurity Adviser in the Obama Administration, where he led
the implementation of the President's Cybersecurity National
Action Plan and advised White House leadership on cybersecurity
programs, investments, and policy decisions.
Welcome back to the Committee. It is good to see you again.
I now recognize you for your five-minute opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF CHRISTOPHER J. DeRUSHA,\1\ FEDERAL CHIEF
INFORMATION SECURITY OFFICER, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
Mr. DeRusha. Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, and
Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify today on the Office of Management and Budget's role in
setting the Federal cybersecurity agenda, including our
response to the SolarWinds supply chain incident.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. DeRusha appears in the Appendix
on page 42.
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I believe we are at a crossroads for our Nation's
cybersecurity. The SolarWinds incident has exposed gaps in our
cybersecurity to identify and manage critical risks, not just
in the Federal Government, but in some of the most mature and
well-resourced companies in the world. This incident should
serve as both a wake-up call and a galvanizing opportunity for
the Federal Government and industry to tackle these problems in
partnership with renewed resolve. As the Federal Chief
Information Security Officer, I am responsible for developing
the strategy to protect Federal information systems and data
and oversee its implementation.
Immediately after agencies detected the SolarWinds
incident, OMB began coordinating with the Cyber Unified
Coordination Group (UCG), which is leading the overall response
to this incident. OMB continues to work with the UCG and agency
executives to collect data on the impact of the event and
identify capability and resourcing gaps for response and
recovery efforts at the agencies. My office is leveraging its
partnerships with Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and CISOs
across the Federal Government, leading regular Council meetings
where we identify common challenges, sharing best practices and
coordinating a consistent approach to Federal cybersecurity.
After decades of underinvestment in Federal IT, this
administration is committed to investing in the infrastructure,
systems, and people needed to build back better. We greatly
appreciate the support from Members of this Committee on the
American Rescue Plan, which has laid the foundation for a
renewed investment in our cybersecurity. With the additional
$650 million in funding for CISA, the Federal Government is
going to be able to provide enhanced monitoring of our networks
and faster response times when incidents do occur.
The additional $1 billion provided to the Technology
Modernization Fund (TMF) will expand our opportunities to
resolve cybersecurity challenges posed by aging Federal IT
systems. The TMF is an innovative funding vehicle. It has
already enabled several priority modernization programs across
the government while providing transparency and accountability
in implementation. We look forward to demonstrating what else
this model can achieve with this new opportunity that you have
given us.
At OMB we are also working to ensure that agency budgets
are aligned to immediate response needs to the SolarWinds
incident while identifying opportunities to harden IT
infrastructure against future attacks. We fully acknowledge
that security is expensive when done properly, but it is even
more costly when it is neglected.
In addition to funding, we must also invest in our IT
workforce. Today Federal agencies struggle to attract
competitive talent, keep pace with private sector pay, and hire
quickly enough to replace departing employees. This
administration will rely on programs that work, such as the
Scholarship for Service CyberCorps which brings promising
talent into the Federal Government at the start of their
careers. We will also continue to grow the U.S. Digital Service
(USDS) and Technology Transformation Service (TTS) at the
General Services Administration (GSA). These are two programs
that recruit individuals with highly sought after skills from
the private sector. In a world of constantly evolving
technology and threats, government has to bring together the
brightest talent to tackle these most pressing challenges.
In my role as Federal CISO, I also chair the Federal
Acquisition Security Council (FASC). This body is responsible
for coordinating efforts to identify and address risks to the
Federal Government's technology supply chain. I look forward to
working with my Council partners to identify opportunities to
use these authorities to effectively address supply chain
risks.
Finally, I would like to highlight OMB's role in leading
agencies to transition to what we are calling ``Zero Trust
Paradigm.'' Zero Trust moves us away from the historic approach
of protecting IT networks at the perimeter and instead assumes
that a network may be compromised at any given time. In this
new model, real-time authentication tests users, blocks
suspicious activity, and prevents adversaries from the kind of
privilege escalation that was demonstrated in the SolarWinds
incident. Many of the tools we need to implement this model
already exist within industry and agency environments, but
successful implementation will require a shift in mind-set and
focus at all levels within Federal agencies.
The activities I just described are essential for improving
Federal cybersecurity, but they are not enough. To maintain our
defense in the long run, we must direct resources where they
are most needed across government. The cybersecurity funding in
the American Rescue Plan is extremely important, but it is just
a downpayment. We have decades of technical debt to pay off,
and the pace of modernization must accelerate.
I commit to bringing agencies together in a coordinated
approach to become more resilient and prepared for future
challenges, and I look forward to working with Congress on
updates to legislative authorities, securing the necessary
funding, and building on lessons learned to enhance Federal
cybersecurity.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before this
Committee, and I look forward to taking your questions.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. DeRusha.
Our second witness is Brandon Wales, the Acting Director of
the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Prior to
becoming Acting Director, Mr. Wales was CISA's first Executive
Director. Mr. Wales has also served in multiple positions
within the Secretary's Office for DHS, including Senior
Counselor to the Secretary for Cyber and Resilience, Acting
Deputy Chief of Staff, and Acting Chief of Staff for the
Department. Prior to joining the Department, Mr. Wales served
as the National Security Aide to United States Senator Jon Kyl
and as a senior associate at a Washington-based foreign policy
and national security think tank.
Welcome, Mr. Wales. You may now proceed with your opening
five-minute statement.
TESTIMONY OF BRANDON WALES,\1\ ACTING DIRECTOR, CYBERSECURITY
AND INFORMATION SECURITY AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY
Mr. Wales. Good morning, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
Portman, and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the
opportunity to testify today regarding the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency's response to the SolarWinds
supply chain compromise.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Wales appear in the Appendix on
page 47.
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CISA leads the Nation's efforts to advance the
cybersecurity, physical security, and resilience of our
critical infrastructure. We share information and enable
operational collaboration between the Federal Government, State
and local governments, the private sector, international
partners, and law enforcement, intelligence, and defense
communities. This role has proven invaluable in managing recent
cyber incidents, and I cannot understate the importance of
collective defense for cybersecurity. But we also know that
more work must be done.
Today we will focus primarily on the SolarWinds supply
chain compromise, but much of what I discuss can be applied to
other incidents, such as the recently announced exploitation of
vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Exchange product. These
incidents highlight the necessity of modernizing our
cybersecurity and network infrastructure in order to truly
defend today and secure tomorrow.
Late last year, CISA became aware of a broad cyber
intrusion campaign largely, but not exclusively, associated
with the supply chain compromise of SolarWinds Orion network
management software. More than 16,000 entities were potentially
exposed to the malicious SolarWinds software, but the U.S.
Government estimates that a much smaller number were
compromised when the threat actor activated the malicious back
door they had installed in the SolarWinds product and moved
into exposed networks.
Once inside of a network, the actor was able to use their
privileged access to abuse the authentication mechanisms, the
systems that control trust and manage identities, ultimately
allowing them to access and exfiltrate email and other data
from compromised networks and Microsoft Office 365 cloud
environments. The primary objective of this threat actor
appears to be gaining access to sensitive but unclassified
communications and to identify opportunities to compromise
additional IT supply chains.
In response, on December 13th the Cyber Unified
Coordination Group, was formed, composed of CISA, the FBI, and
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),
with support from the National Security Agency (NSA). The UCG
coordinates both the investigation and remediation efforts for
the Federal Government. As the lead for asset response in the
Federal civilian space, CISA is providing technical assistance
to affected entities who request it as they identify and
mitigate potential compromises.
CISA's work in response to this campaign falls under four
primary lines of effort: one, helping to scope the campaign;
two, sharing information and detections; three, supporting
short-term remediation; and, four providing guidance and
assistance in long-term network recovery. While these lines of
effort are a response to this intrusion, they form the
framework around which we think about our response to any cyber
incident.
Additionally, even as we respond to and mitigate the
impacts of both the SolarWinds and Microsoft incidents, we are
already looking ahead to ensure that CISA is appropriately
postured to defend today and secure tomorrow. To this end, we
are focused on urgent improvements across four areas of
strategic growth that I would be happy to discuss in more
detail.
First, we must increase CISA's visibility into
cybersecurity risks across the Federal civilian Executive
Branch and, where feasible, across non-Federal entities.
Second, we must expand CISA's incident response capacity.
Third, we must improve our ability to analyze large volumes
of cybersecurity information in order to rapidly identify
emerging risks and direct timely mitigation.
And, fourth, we must drive adoption of defensible network
architectures, including by progressing toward zero trust
environments, as Chris laid out.
I want to thank this Committee for their hard work on
prioritizing cybersecurity investments in the American Rescue
Act. That funding is an important downpayment on the
cybersecurity capabilities that I have just described.
But we are not stopping there. We are still responding
aggressively to this campaign. For example, just last week we
rolled out a new website that consolidates information and
resources on best practices for remediating compromised systems
and preparing Federal departments and agencies for long-term
actions to build more secure, resilient networks. This week we
provided Federal agencies compromised during this campaign with
detailed guidance on evicting the adversary from networks.
We also released the CISA Hunt and Incident Response
Program (CHIRP), a multi-function forensic scanning tool to
assist network defenders with detecting threat actor activity
on vulnerable SolarWinds devices.
Before I close, I want to address a more fundamental
question. What does this all mean? The SolarWinds campaign as
well as the most recent Microsoft Exchange vulnerability
exploitation highlight the lengths to which sophisticated
adversaries will go to compromise our networks. They will use
never seen before tradecraft, exquisite techniques, and zero-
day vulnerabilities to defeat our current cybersecurity
architecture. Knowing that, we must raise our game. We need
modern cybersecurity governance and capabilities. We need
cybersecurity tools and services that provide us a better
chance at detecting the most sophisticated attacks, and we need
to rethink our approach to managing cybersecurity not only
across the Federal civilian Executive Branch agencies but also
across our most critical infrastructure.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify on this
important subject, and I welcome your questions.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Wales.
Our final witness today is Tonya Ugoretz, Acting Assistant
Director for the FBI's Cyber Division, which has primary
responsibility for the Bureau's efforts to counter national
security-related cyber intrusions. Prior to her current role,
Ms. Ugoretz was the Deputy Assistant Director (DAD) overseeing
national-level cyber policy, analysis of cyber criminal and
national security threats, and partner engagement. Before
joining the FBI, she spent 3 years at the Office of the
Director for National Intelligence as the first Director of the
Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) for which
she received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service
Medal.
Congratulations on that, Ms. Ugoretz. Please, you are
welcome to offer your five-minute opening remarks.
TESTIMONY OF TONYA UGORETZ,\1\ ACTING ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, CYBER
DIVISION, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
JUSTICE
Ms. Ugoretz. Thank you, and good morning, Chairman Peters,
Ranking Member Portman, and Members of this Committee. Thank
you for the opportunity to be here today and to testify on
behalf of the FBI on the Federal perspective on the SolarWinds
supply chain compromise.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Ugoretz appear in the Appendix on
page 53.
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As you know, this hearing comes at an important time, as
the cyber community addresses not only this incident, but also
the recent exploitation of previously unknown Microsoft
Exchange vulnerabilities. While each cyber intrusion is unique,
these two incidents and the thousands of computer intrusions
the FBI addresses every day illustrate the persistence and
determination of our adversaries to use cyber means to achieve
their goals, whether that is for personal profit, theft of
intelligence or intellectual property, or contingency planning
for more disruptive or destructive attacks.
That is why the FBI's role in disrupting and responding to
cyber intrusions is vital and unique. As a member of both the
intelligence community (IC) and the law enforcement community,
we integrate our view of adversary plans and intentions with
information we obtain through a variety of means, including
criminal legal process and national security tools like Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); human intelligence, using
confidential sources and undercover operations; consent and
cooperation from victims; strong local relationships built and
maintained by our hundreds of domestic offices; and foreign
partnerships through our legal attaches around the world.
We do this in order to understand who the threat actors
are, where and how they operate, and who supports them. We
share that intelligence with many partners, including network
defenders and our colleagues at CISA, in order to harden
networks with Treasury, to build sanctions packages, and with
our military-intelligence community and foreign partners who
are able to take the fight to our adversaries overseas.
The magnitude and seriousness of this threat is part of why
we are so committed to working with partners. The FBI's cyber
is to impose risk and consequences on our cyber adversaries,
and to do using the best tools available, whether those are the
FBI's or someone else's. The FBI will continue to innovate to
address cyber threats in much the same way as we have adapted
to emerging threats over more than a century.
For the SolarWinds incident, the FBI has led threat
response activities focusing on identifying the following:
first, known victims and others who may be targeted; second,
who conducted the activity and how; and, third, opportunities
to pursue, disrupt, and hold accountable those responsible.
We have conducted this work as part of the cyber Unified
Coordination Group established on December 13th under
Presidential Policy Directive 41 (PPD-41), which balances
concurrent lines of effort focused on national security and
investigative requirements, which the FBI leads, with
restoration and recovery, which CISA leads.
We have leveraged our assets around the country and around
the world in the response to this incident, to triage the data
and exploit evidence, to provide assistance to victims, and to
work with industry victims and partners to gather information.
I want to take a moment to emphasize that last point.
Stitching together a complete picture of a cyber threat or
incident requires information from many sources. The SolarWinds
incident and the current incident involving the Microsoft
Exchange server vulnerability underscore the essential value of
using law enforcement authorities, voluntary sharing by third
parties, and victim cooperation.
As a government, we would not know the identities of most
of the affected entities without using all of these tools,
including legal process and the information we learn from our
incident response engagements. Our pre-established
relationships with the public and private sectors throughout
the country are critical to identifying the threat,
understanding its scope, and investigating its origin in order
to protect others. This sharing and collaboration across
agencies does not just happen at the moment of an incident, but
requires trust-based relationships built over time. By leaning
into those partnerships, all of us together who are combating
malicious cyber activity become stronger when we weaken the
perpetrators together.
In that vein, I want to say that I truly appreciate the
proactive cooperation of the private sector in this incident
and all the victims who have come forward. We also appreciate
congressional engagement on our mission of imposing risk and
consequences on those who seek to harm the American people and
who undermine safety, security, and confidence in our digitally
connected world.
These incidents drive home what we already know: that only
a whole-of-society approach will be effective against these
threats. The FBI, with our fellow UCG members, will continue
taking every necessary action to investigate this incident,
identify and hold accountable those responsible, and share
information with our partners and with the American people.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you
today, and I look forward to your questions.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ms. Ugoretz, for your opening
statement. To each of you, thank you once again for being here
today, and thank you for the work that you are doing on this
issue each and every day.
Mr. Wales, the recent attacks on SolarWinds and Microsoft
Exchange, as you mentioned in your opening comments very
clearly, show that our adversaries are growing increasingly
adept at infiltrating our Nation's sensitive networks. I want
to just cut right to chase here. What, in your opinion, was the
core reason for these security failures? As the lead
cybersecurity agency, what specific steps are you taking now to
address those failures?
Mr. Wales. Sure, thank you, Senator. Getting right to the
heart of it, part of the challenge is that you can only secure
what you can see. Over the past decade, our system of
protection that has largely relied upon sensors deployed at the
perimeters of networks that is designed to be fed by
intelligence, by information from the private sector, has
relied upon detecting known malicious activity, and our
adversaries have advanced. They are no longer using the same
infrastructure to target us repeatedly. They move quickly from
server to server, mostly located in the United States. This is
all designed to ensure that we do not know where they are
coming from, and our traditional systems, our traditional
protection systems, are unable to stop them. What that means is
that we need to look at new ways of understanding the nature of
how those threats are emanating, where they are coming from,
and it means that we need to deploy different types of systems
to make sure that we have the right level of insight in terms
of where the activity is happening.
As I pointed out, one of the main areas that we plan on
focusing, including with the resources provided through the
American Rescue Act, is looking inside of networks, moving from
the perimeter, from the network, inside of networks to the
endpoint, to the critical servers and work stations deployed
throughout the Federal Government to ensure that we have the
right level of insight.
Now, again, there needs to be a right balance. Those
perimeter security sensors are still valuable. We use them to
both protect as well as to forensically look back and see where
activity may have been so we can conduct investigations. But
that balance was too far out of whack in the past. It is too
focused on the network and not enough inside of networks at the
host. That is one key aspect, but there are a variety of others
that the Federal Government is working through now, including
ways in which we can enhance our ability to provide--we can
enhance our supply chain security for the critical software and
products that the Federal Government purchases.
There is a lot of work to do across the board, and I think
both in the openings that Chris provided and myself, we have
outlined a number of areas that we believe the Federal
Government needs to move to, to provide us the level of
security that we now expect in the face of these more
sophisticated adversaries.
Chairman Peters. I am going to get to the supply chain
issues in a moment, but a final question to you, Mr. Wales. You
mentioned how you are taking a deeper look in the systems. How
can we have assurance that the SolarWinds malware has now been
removed from all of our Federal systems? How confident is CISA
that the hackers are still not out there lurking in our
agencies' networks?
Mr. Wales. Sure. The majority of agencies have been
progressing in their initial response and remediation work.
Many of them have enlisted CISA as well as third-party agencies
to assist them in that effort. As I indicated in my opening
remarks, we have also provided them very detailed eviction
guidance that they can work through or checklists to make sure
that that was already done. CISA is working with each of them
collectively and individually to ensure that they have executed
the remediation of their networks. That provides us a degree of
confidence that the adversary is no longer present.
That being said--and I have said this before--our response
to an incident of this significance is going to take time. In
many cases agencies are going to want to put in place stronger
protections and better harden their systems and improve their
defenses. As they do that, over time we will gain increasing
confidence that the adversary no longer has the ability to
access and is no longer present inside of those systems.
Chairman Peters. Thank you. Ms. Ugoretz, I understand that
most of the agencies hit by the SolarWinds hack have completed
security audits, as we have heard. But can we consider
ourselves in the recovery phase now in this incident? When
should Congress expect the FBI to provide an after-action
report to us?
Ms. Ugoretz. Thank you, Senator. As part of Presidential
Policy Directive 41, which guided the establishment of the
Unified Coordination Group that addresses this incident, there
is an after-action provision built into that directive by which
every time we stand up one of these coordination groups to
address a significant cyber incident, that automatically
triggers an after-action report once that is completed, and we
would certainly be happy to discuss with this Committee how the
results of that might be shared.
In terms of how to consider what phase of this we are in,
as I mentioned in my opening statement, when we look at the
incident response to an incident such as this, there are really
concurrent lines of effort, so it is not exactly one phase ends
and another begins, but the national security and investigative
steps that the FBI is taking are running in parallel with that
mitigation and recovery effort that CISA leads.
I would say both of those efforts are continuing. For our
part, the purpose of those efforts that we are leading is
attribution, understanding who conducted this activity, why and
how, so that we can create the widest possible range of
responses for policymakers to consider. Law enforcement actions
might be part of that response, such as indictments or
disruption of infrastructure or other such actions. But we find
that it is most powerful when we are able to say with detail
and as transparently as possible how exactly adversaries
conducted this activity and ultimately who was behind it. The
effort to develop that information investigatively continues.
Chairman Peters. Thank you.
Mr. DeRusha, I am sure many of my colleagues will ask more
questions related to supply chain issues, but I just want to in
my remaining time here ask you about legislation that I
introduced last Congress, the Supply Chain Counterintelligence
Training Act, which will ensure that appropriate officials are
trained to identify counterintelligence threats. We were not
able to get that across the finish line last session. We plan
to reintroduce it and move forward. I know you are familiar
with the legislation. Would you support that? Why is it
important?
Mr. DeRusha. Yes, Senator, I absolutely commit to working
with your staff on that bill. It is an important bill. It
focuses on one of the things that I mentioned, which is
constantly ensuring that our workforce is trained to follow the
trends of our adversaries. For that reason, of course, we fully
commit to working with you on that bill.
Chairman Peters. Great. Thank you.
Ranking Member Portman, you are recognized for your
questions.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Chairman Peters.
Thank you all for your testimony this morning and your hard
work on this. One of the concerns that I mentioned in the
opening statement is accountability, and, in particular, we
have been more active up here on the legislative side as well
as within government to try to figure out how to push back
against these attacks. As a result, I am concerned that there
are new entities and there is the opportunity for duplication,
confusion in leadership, and just lack of accountability. I saw
this with regard to SolarWinds. When it happened, there was
some pointing of fingers, and the fact is the private sector
found it, not even government.
So the question is: As we look at legislation to try to
reform some of the existing laws, including FISMA, which is the
legislation that requires that the agencies have better cyber
defenses and practices--and I mentioned earlier we had an in-
depth investigation in that and found that a number of agencies
were not keeping up. But as we look at reforming that, the
question is, how do we do it?
Mr. DeRusha, between you and the Federal Chief--in your
role as the Federal Chief Information Security Officer, and,
Mr. Wales, you are head of CISA, and, Ms. Ugoretz, you are the
Assistant Director for FBI's Cyber Division, and then we have
the newly created National Cyber Director position within the
White House, there are a lot of people responsible.
So I guess, Mr. DeRusha, I would start with you. When a
cyber attack happens, who do we hold accountable
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, as Brandon described earlier, for
significant incident response we leverage currently the UCG,
which is led by National Security Council (NSC) staff, DHS,
FBI, DNI, and then others as appropriate, so for this
particular incident several other agencies are brought in.
Because everyone has a key role to play, it is really about
ensuring we have the appropriate governance structures in place
to manage these events together in that we are keeping clear
lines of communication as we work through these things.
Senator Portman. So no one is accountable?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator----
Senator Portman. By the way, you added another wrinkle to
this, which is there is someone on the National Security
Council apparently who has been designated as a coordinator in
addition to what CISA is doing, in addition to what OMB is
doing, in addition to this new role in the national defense
authorization bill, which is called the ``National Cyber
Director position.'' Is that accurate?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, I would characterize it somewhat
differently. I believe that, again, as I said, everyone has a
key role to play here in their authorities, and we work quite
well together. I do not believe that is an issue. Because we
have these type processes, we are coordinating and streamlining
all of our response efforts.
Senator Portman. If everyone is in charge, no one is in
charge, right? So exactly who is accountable?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, again, just to say, every agency has
its own role and responsibility in cyber incident response,
and----
Senator Portman. OK. That was the answer you gave me last
time, and that is great. But let me ask you a direct question
about this new National Cyber Director position. It has not
been filled yet by the administration, but it was in the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Do you think that
position is necessary given the fact that you have four or five
different entities now, you say, working all together?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, we are working carefully on looking
about the roles and responsibilities across all the different
agencies and equities, and I know the administration is
committed to filling that and other critical positions. So that
is being worked on.
What I will say is absolutely there is a need to continue
to improve and enhance our coordination, and this role will
help us do that.
Senator Portman. OK. I wonder if maybe the other panelists
have thoughts on this. It seems to me somebody needs to be in
charge, right? For over a year, this attack when unnoticed, and
when it was finally discovered, it was discovered not by
government but by the private sector. It was not even
SolarWinds. It was FireEye, which was another supplier.
Mr. Wales, you look like you might be interested in saying
something. Who should be in charge? Again, why don't you tell
me what you think about the National Cyber Director position?
It sounded like what Mr. DeRusha was saying is it is just
another responsibility--he said there are several important
responsibilities to be filled. I mean, shouldn't this be the
one that actually coordinates everything and has the ultimate
accountability?
Mr. Wales. I would kind of highlight a couple of areas----
Senator Portman. I know you will not just protect your own
CISA jurisdiction because you are a broad-minded person.
Mr. Wales. Absolutely. I will say a couple of things.
One is Congress has provided us, to the various agencies,
responsibilities, authorities, and accountability. For example,
under FISMA every agency head is responsible for the security
and the cybersecurity of the systems that they operate. I think
that is one area that we need to----
Senator Portman. They have failed. I am sorry. I just have
to throw that out there because those eight agencies that we
identified have not met the basic requirements of FISMA. Yet
who is accountable?
Mr. Wales. I think ultimately under FISMA agency heads are
accountable. There is certainly accountability for CISA for the
role that we play in helping to protect and secure and support
those agencies in the management of the Federal civilian
Executive Branch networks.
I think the idea that Congress had for the National Cyber
Director was a way to drive coordination at the White House,
particularly related to coordinating on incident response. But
the position does not exist yet, and so I think a lot of this
will be determined by once it is established, how the
identification of roles and responsibilities for its office.
What I will say is that the ability for the government to
work together on cybersecurity incidents I would argue has
never been stronger, in part based upon a lot of work from our
career officials at the FBI, CISA, DNI, and NSA. We are working
more collaboratively; there is more joint engagement with the
private sector, with our Federal agency partners, to ensure
that there is not duplication of effort, that we are all
bringing our unique expertise, skills, and abilities when we
have cybersecurity incidents or we need to help agencies
prepare ahead of time. I think we would hope that any new
addition to that is additive and is strengthening that
collaboration that currently exists and making it stronger.
Senator Portman. OK. I am glad to hear that, and it was a
relative description saying it has never been stronger. You did
not say it is as strong as it needs to be. Obviously, we had
the most massive attack in the history of our government, and
it went undetected for over a year, and then it was detected by
the private sector, not by government, and has incurred
tremendous damage, we believe. Let us continue the
conversation. We will come back in the second round. But I do
think better coordination is part of the answer, as you say,
but also accountability. Since you mentioned FISMA, sorry, but
I had to talk about the fact that we know FISMA is not working.
Let us figure out how we can find the entity or the person in
particular who is responsible and, therefore, accountable.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Portman, and I cannot
agree with you more. There needs to be lines of authority,
lines of accountability. That is something we will definitely
be drilling deeper into. I think it is an important topic.
Thank you for raising that.
I now recognize Senator Carper for your questions, Senator
Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning,
colleagues. Good morning to our witnesses.
I want to say to Brandon Wales, thank you for having an
easy name to pronounce, and thank you for speaking so slowly
and it is easy to follow your testimony also.
I would say to Christopher, I want to pronounce your name
``DeRusha.'' Is that the way you pronounce it, ``DeRusha''?
Mr. DeRusha. Yes, Senator, ``DeRusha.''
Senator Carper. ``Dee-Rusha.'' Double ``E,'' ``Dee-Rusha.''
Is that the way your parents pronounce it?
Mr. DeRusha. Yes, sir.
Senator Carper. Just checking. Now, I want to say to Tonya,
to my staff I said, ``How in God's name does she pronounce her
last name?'' They tell me it is ``you-GO-retz,'' with the
pronunciation--the emphasis on the second syllable. Is that
true?
Ms. Ugoretz. Thank you for asking, Senator. It is ``YOU-
gur-etz.''
Senator Carper. I am glad I asked. The pronunciation is on
the first syllable, right?
Ms. Ugoretz. Yes, sir.
Senator Carper. All right. I will never make that mistake
again.
Thank you all for your testimony, and thank you for
presenting it in a very understandable way. Sometimes we have
people who rush through issues like this. These are not issues
that come naturally to a lot of us, and thank you for making it
almost understandable for even a guy like me.
I have been privileged to be on this Committee for a long
time, almost since--even before it was the Homeland Security
Committee. I have worked for years with our colleagues,
Democrat and Republican, including some of the ones that are
here today who just preceded me. We worked across the aisle on
Federal data security and breach notification legislation that
would require companies to have a comprehensive information
security program to protect our country's sensitive
information, our citizens' sensitive information. We have had a
hard time moving legislation that provides really guidance for
protection and investigation and notification and when we have
breaches. I think one of the reasons why we have had a hard
time moving legislation is there are about three or four
committees of jurisdiction, and our Committee is one of them;
Judiciary is another one. But there are bunch of committees
that have jurisdiction. The Commerce Committee has
jurisdiction. It is kind of hard to actually get on the same
page. It is not so much about a partisan issue, but it is just
a jurisdictional issue, which is unfortunate.
I believe that as we move to a more sophisticated cyber
threat landscape and face increased ransomware attacks across
our critical infrastructure, protectors of national data, a
security and breach notification standard is more important
than ever.
According to our friends at SolarWinds, nearly 18,000
entities received a malicious version of their software with
estimates stating that roughly 100 private sector companies
were compromised.
Director Wales, do you have any suggestions on what we
should include in Federal data security and breach notification
legislation that would enhance the cyber posture of the private
sector? Please.
Mr. Wales. Thank you, sir, and that is an extremely
important issue, and I have mentioned this before. Our ability
to ensure broad protection against cyber incidents requires and
relies upon being provided information from victims about what
has happened. If victims do not provide information on their
breaches, on how they were compromised, the tactics that the
adversary used, the adversaries can continue to reuse those
tactics and victimize additional companies and public sector
entities. We are eager to work with Congress on legislation
that would strengthen our ability to have the right level of
insight into the tactics that our adversary uses and what is
happening from a cybersecurity perspective at private sector
companies.
I am not here today to prescribe what that might look like,
but we do believe that it is essential going forward. Tonya may
have some additional points she wants to raise on this.
Ms. Ugoretz. Thank you.
Senator Carper. Tonya Ugoretz, go ahead.
Ms. Ugoretz. Yes, sir. Thank you for the question. We also
agree that the current regime of what I think are 54
inconsistent and overlapping regimes for the private sector
companies to report breaches causes confusion for the industry
and makes it more difficult for the Federal Government to have
a consistent, consolidated picture of the threats we are facing
and how they are affecting our private citizens.
There has previously been legislation introduced, and I
know this was a topic taken up by the Cyberspace Solarium
Commission (CSC) of which the FBI's Director, Director Wray,
was a member, that also emphasized mandatory data breach
notification and looking not just at what I think the original
focus of such legislation was, which was protecting personally
identifiable information (PII) of our citizens when it is
breached, but also looking at how can we receive consistent
reporting on breaches of critical networks such as those owned
by the private sector in our critical infrastructure sectors,
as well as any breaches affecting Federal Government
information. We would certainly be supportive without, again,
specifying any specific piece of legislation.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you, ma'am.
Maybe another question, if I could, for Director Wales. I
believe that CISA, an entity that a bipartisan group that was
on this Committee helped to create in previous years. But CISA
has an indispensable role to play in enhancing our Nation's
cybersecurity. In your testimony, Director Wales, I believe you
state that we must increase CISA's visibility into
cybersecurity risks across the Federal civilian agencies,
especially after nine Federal agencies have been compromised
through the SolarWinds attacks.
I often talk about the importance of the three C's--
communicate, compromise, collaborate--really the keys, if you
will, to a democracy. But in working with Federal agencies that
have requested CISA assistance in responding to the SolarWinds
attack, are there any agency communications or collaboration
issues that we should maybe work to improve?
Mr. Wales. Sure, Senator. We work in a voluntary way with
those agencies. We believe we are a resource to them, and I
think one of the good-news stories is that over the past
decade, Federal agencies across the board have enhanced their
ability to respond to cyber incidents. They have developed
their own organic capability, they have put in place contracts
with third-party cybersecurity firms--all designed to give them
enhanced capacity to detect and respond to cyber incidents.
CISA is there to supplement those capabilities.
Our work is tailored for each agency, depending on the
types of support and requirements they have. I would say during
SolarWinds the majority of our work or one of the more
substantial parts of our work was providing cloud-based
forensics, helping agencies examine what had happened inside of
their cloud environments that had been targeted by this
adversary. And, that I think is a positive story both about
where the agencies are in terms of the maturation and about our
ability to deploy tailored, customized support for each of
those agencies based upon the requirements and skill. I think
we are very happy with the degree of collaboration we are
getting and what that relationship looks like between CISA and
the organic host agency when it comes to those types of
compromises.
Senator Carper. Thank you, Director.
Mr. Chairman, thanks for giving me a few extra seconds. For
the record, I am going to be asking the Director how we can
make our cyber posture more preventive and less reactionary. I
will ask that one for the record, if I could.
Thanks so much. Thank you all for your testimony and for
your service.
Chairman Peters. Great. Thank you, Senator Carper.
Senator Hassan, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN
Senator Hassan. Thank you very much, Chairman Peters and
Ranking Member Portman. I want to thank the witnesses not only
for appearing today to talk about this important national
security issue but for your service. I appreciate it very much.
I want to focus on discrete areas where I think we need to
do more to improve the cybersecurity of our Nation. The first
question is to Acting Director Wales and Mr. DeRusha. Acting
Director Wales, you testified at a hearing last week that
CISA's Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, is
the foundation upon which we can build further capabilities to
secure the Federal network and be able to detect a breach
similar to SolarWinds. It is clear that we need to improve the
CDM program and build additional layers of protection on top of
it. But before we can make those much-needed enhancements, we
need CDM to be fully implemented in the first place. That is
why Senator Cornyn and I introduced a bill last Congress to
codify CDM. However, last August a report issued by the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that some agencies
were encountering problems deploying CDM.
Acting Director Wales and Mr. DeRusha, what are CISA and
OMB doing to ensure that CDM is deployed as quickly as possible
across all civilian agencies and the deployments accurately
detect and monitor all devices on the network? We can start
with either one of you, however you want to----
Mr. Wales. Sure, so I will start and then turn it over to
Chris. We believe, as I stated last week, that CDM is really
the foundation to ensure that we can get capabilities out to
102 Federal civilian Executive Branch agencies and have a
common baseline of sets of tools and capabilities. I would say
we are very focused on the small number of agencies that have
had challenges with deploying some of the tools. This is a
suite of different capabilities that provide asset management,
software and development management and configuration and patch
management. There are different capabilities that they are
deploying, and we have had success in getting almost all
Federal agencies and all part of all Federal agencies to a
common baseline.
There are obviously some outliers when you are talking
about the scale and scope of the Federal Government. We are
working hard to close out the first two phases of CDM, Phase 1
and Phase 2, this year so that we can move into Phases 3 and 4
and build additional capabilities, the types of capabilities
that we need to get us better, deeper insights into what is
happening at Federal agencies.
The one additional point that I will add is that when CDM
was initially created, there was a division. Agencies had
object-level view, meaning they could see into the individual
devices on their networks, but CISA was not able to. I think we
are now seeing the limitation that that poses on our ability to
have a comprehensive understanding of the cyber risk picture of
the dot-gov, and we are hopeful that new guidance will come out
of the administration soon that will move us toward CISA having
broader and deeper insights into that level of detail and allow
us to have the right level of visibility to execute our role
when it comes to securing the dot-gov.
Senator Hassan. OK, thank you.
Mr. DeRusha.
Mr. DeRusha. Yes, Senator, I think Brandon's description is
very accurate. We are aware of some challenges at certain
agencies in implementation. I think, the vision and the goal of
CDM is right. In certain instances we will continue to look at
implementation and make sure that the program is successful in
those agencies. So at OMB, in my office we are discretely
attuned to that. This is a priority for both CISA and OMB to
ensure that CDM is effectively delivered and that we can get to
the full vision, which is getting that data back to CISA so
that we can get away Excel spreadsheet data calls and into
live, real-time monitoring and action from CISA, which is the
goal of the program. So we look forward to continuing to
enhance it and learn from the past.
Senator Hassan. Well, thank you for those answers. Let me
just check in on a couple of things. Are there additional
authorities or other assistance that you need from Congress to
ensure timely deployment of CDM? Do you have the tools you
need, or what can we do to help further
Mr. Wales. I do not believe we need additional authorities
at this time.
Senator Hassan. OK. Mr. DeRusha?
Mr. DeRusha. I agree, Senator. I do not believe we need
additional authorities at this time.
Senator Hassan. OK. What capabilities are you planning on
building on top of CDM to help ensure Federal networks are
protected into the future, especially as agencies increasingly
adopt cloud products?
Mr. Wales. Sure. I think one of the significant ones that
we highlighted that is critical and we believe will be a key
part of our implementation of the funding under the American
Rescue Act is better endpoint detection and response tools that
would give us the ability to understand what is happening on
critical servers and work stations. It would give us the
ability to detect more malicious activity, to respond more
quickly, and working with agencies to block anomalous behavior
before it moves broadly into a network. That is just one
example of ways in which we are looking to use CDM to deploy
that. Ten years ago, we could not move right there because
agencies did not even understand their full suite of assets on
their network, so you could not have endpoints when you did not
know how many endpoints you had.
Senator Hassan. Right.
Mr. Wales. I think we have now come to the point where
those kinds of more sophisticated tools are not within our
reach.
Senator Hassan. Thank you.
Let me go on to another issue, again, to Acting Director
Wales. You testified last week that the Microsoft Exchange
attacks have heavily impacted State and local governments,
which do not have the same resources or capacity to respond to
cyber attacks as the Federal Government does. I am concerned
about the impact of these attacks on State and local entities,
particularly when there are reports of China-based threat
actors exploiting this vulnerability pretty much at will.
Based on what you have seen from these two recent
incidents, why do you think it is a national security
imperative for the Federal Government to strongly support State
and local governments in improving their cyber capabilities?
Mr. Wales. Ma'am, we could not agree more, and Secretary
Mayorkas spoke about this publicly as well. We want to work
with Congress on ways in which we can identify how do we
sustain the level of investment that State and locals need to
put in place the cybersecurity architecture at the State and
local level that is commensurate with the level of threat that
they are facing. We know there are proposals for grant programs
floating around both Houses of Congress. Without prescribing
one, we are eager to work with you on what those look like and
how they can build capabilities. Also on the response end,
another proposal out of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission was
for a Cyber Response and Recovery Fund that would allow--that
States could tap into when they are facing significant
cybersecurity incidents. I think that is another area where we
would love to work with this Committee and others to make sure
that we have the right whole-of-nation architecture in place
and we do not have weak points, whether at the Federal level,
the State and local level, or in the private sector.
Senator Hassan. I appreciate that very much, and I am one
of the advocates of a stand-alone cybersecurity grant program.
When you have as many small communities as I do who have been
subject to attacks, despite their best efforts, and the State
Chief Information Officers are all really advocating for this,
they want to work with us, but finding the resources and the
expertise to do it is tough. I would look forward to working
with you on that. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Ms. Ugoretz. Senator or Mr. Chairman, would it be all right
if I just added briefly to that answer?
Chairman Peters. Yes, go ahead.
Ms. Ugoretz. I just wanted to note that, in addition to
CISA's very important cybersecurity efforts with State and
locals with regards to defensive networks, we are also working
quite a bit with State and local officials from the FBI as well
as local law enforcement at that level in coordination with the
U.S. Secret Service (USSS) to see how we can buildup capacity
and capability of State and local officials to respond to cyber
incidents and cyber threats, obviously we are always there to
lend that assistance. But, for example, with Secret Service,
through their National Training Center (NTC), we are jointly
providing training to State and local officials. We are hosting
police executives at our National Cyber Investigative Joint
Task Force to provide them the national-level insight into
cyber threats. We are also inviting State and local law
enforcement to be part of our cyber task forces in our field
offices, which are similar to our Joint Terrorism Task Forces
(JTTF) where they can actually work those threats jointly and
thereby kind of grow their capacity to respond.
Senator Hassan. Thank you for that, and I know in New
Hampshire how deeply our law enforcement and State and local
officials appreciate their partnership with the FBI and the
support you are all providing. I look forward to continuing
that relationship, too.
Thank you.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hassan.
Senator Rosen, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROSEN
Senator Rosen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to all
the witnesses for being here today.
I want to talk a little bit about supply chain risk
management (SCRM). Our agencies are growing more reliant on
information and communications technologies. The Federal
Government is increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks. I do
not have to tell any of you that. The breach of the SolarWinds
Orion system really revealed the risk of the Federal
Government's dependence on widely used commercial software. If
a product could be compromised and go unnoticed for months--for
months--how many more software supply chain compromises are out
there at this very moment? I would like to go to Mr. Wales,
because in October CISA directed agencies to create
vulnerability disclosure policies (VDPs), which describe how an
organization handles reported vulnerabilities. Are you
considering extending the directive to cover third-party
vendors, especially those that provide IT products or services
to the Federal Government?
Mr. Wales. Ma'am, we have not considered that at this time,
but it is an interesting idea, one that I think we will want to
work through. It is not clear that we would necessarily need to
do that through directive. There is a lot that we need to do
through the Federal contracting process to ensure that the
vendors that are providing IT products and services for the
Federal Government have the appropriate level of cybersecurity
in place based upon the information and their place within the
networks that they are supporting.
That is certainly an area that we are actively working with
OMB on and with other Federal agencies to ensure that we put
that in place.
Senator Rosen. It seems like there are still some
vulnerabilities out there, so I hope we continue to work on
that. But I wonder if consistent dictate to Federal agencies,
other Federal agencies, how quickly, if we find a
vulnerability, they must fix it. If they cannot dictate to
Federal agencies, is this an authority you need? Then if it is
something you do, how do we ensure that those agencies actually
have the workforce and expertise that they need to respond
quickly and effectively to what you may require?
Mr. Wales. Sure, so I will answer that, and then I will ask
Chris--I think there may be some additional points from OMB he
may want to raise.
First is in many cases we have done that, so one of the
first binding operational directives that CISA executed back
when we got this authority several years ago was to close
critical vulnerabilities within 30 days. Actually, what we saw
over the past several years is that agencies have gotten better
and better, faster and faster at closing critical
vulnerabilities that are identified, and we have now lowered
the amount of time they have from 30 days to 15 days. We are
seeing real progress using our directive authority when it
comes to closing critical vulnerabilities that agencies or CISA
identify.
But you are exactly right. One of the areas that I have
continued to push, which is while CISA needed additional
resources through the American Rescue Act, while we want to
ensure that we continue to build our capabilities, deploy more
tools and capabilities to agencies, there needs to be sustained
investment across the board so that the agencies themselves can
continue to leverage those enhanced capabilities and can take
the appropriate actions in a timely manner.
Chris, anything else you want to add?
Mr. DeRusha. I would just add that the VDP programs are
extremely important. They bring in a very discrete skill set to
the Federal Government, and discrete capabilities. We have
other efforts that I mentioned in testimony where we are going
to expand U.S. Digital Service, Technology Transformation
Service (TTS) at GSA. Again, the goal here is to get a lot of
these highly skilled people into government, and whether that
is using flexible vehicles to have them come for shorter
periods of time as opposed to being full-time feds. Then we are
also going to be focused, working with Federal CIO Clare
Martorana, Director of Office of Personnel Management (OPM), we
will be developing new initiatives to ensure that the career
working is reskilled and ready to face these challenges.
Senator Rosen. Thank you. I would like to move on to our
infrastructure cybersecurity, like our electric grid, our water
grid, power grid, those kinds of things. When we think about
what we learned from the SolarWinds attack, it is worth noting
that the Cybersecurity Solarium Commission last year
recommended significantly increasing supply chain risk
management for critical infrastructure. Last Congress I
introduced the Cyber Sense Act. That is bipartisan legislation
that would create a voluntary cyber sense program at the
Department of Energy (DOE) to test the compromise of products
and technologies used in our bulk power systems.
So, Mr. Wales, what other areas or what other ways can
electric or other utilities, how can they reduce their cyber
risk? And would decreasing our reliance on international supply
chains decrease our cybersecurity concerns?
Mr. Wales. I think it is not necessarily a question of
international versus domestic supply chains, but it is a matter
of what is the supply chain risk management approach that we
are taking to identify potentially problematic vendors or
critical products or services that need an enhanced level of
scrutiny.
There was a bulk power Executive Order (EO) that was signed
out at the last administration that continues to work along--
the Department of Energy is the lead. It is designed exactly to
your point, to further scrutinize across the Federal Government
the critical products that are going into the bulk power grid
to make sure that if we have any information that would
indicate a security risk, that we are able to take action on
that.
We have a similar Executive Order focused on the
communications sector that the Department of Commerce is
working, and all the Federal agencies involved in this are
working together to ensure that there is a consistent
understanding for how we are approaching supply chain risk
management and bring it to bear, in addition to other efforts
like the FASC managed by OMB.
There is a lot of work in supply chain security happening
across the Federal Government. There is a lot of coordination
happening, and hopefully over time it pays the level of
dividends that we need.
Senator Rosen. Thank you. I look forward to seeing some of
the reporting that has been required by the GAO as we look to
see what you are doing to block new, unknown malware, how you
are coordinating with other agencies. We have a lot of work to
do in this area, and I appreciate what you are doing so far,
and continue to work with us.
Thank you. I yield back.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Rosen.
Senator Romney, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROMNEY
Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Wales, these things keep happening. We keep having
hacks of our government systems, of course, also in the private
sector. Even if you are well organized and you are doing your
very best to prevent hacks from occurring and intrusions like
the ones we have described today, is this going to keep
happening? Is this something that we all expect as a
government, that, yes, we are going to keep getting hacked and
they are going to get information, they are going to get into
military bases, they are going to get in to various other data
centers? Is this something that we ought to just expect is
going to be happening going forward?
Mr. Wales. I would say that our adversaries are showing no
signs that they will stop using cybersecurity to advance their
purposes, whether that is criminal, nation-state for intel
collection, or as Tonya said earlier, to pre-position for
potentially more disruptive----
Senator Romney. Are we outgunned just in terms--I
understand that the Russians have buildings full of people who
are their very best and brightest, from their very best
schools, who are devoted to hacking into our systems and
gathering information. Are we outgunned in this country to be
able to fight against that? Or is it simply it is almost
impossible to plan for every possible attack?
Mr. Wales. It is impossible to plan for every possible
attack. What I would say is what we want to do is put in place
both the programs as well as the capabilities that make it more
likely that we will stop them, make more likely that if they
are successful, we detect it faster and can respond more
quickly, and ultimately make our systems more resilient; that
even if they get inside, there is less damage they can do
because they cannot move laterally into other parts of the
networks. There is a variety of things that we need to do on
the defensive side to ensure that we have cybersecurity that is
commensurate with the level of threat that we face, which is
significant.
Senator Romney. Are you comfortable with the expertise that
we get from outside of government to be able to devise
strategies to be able to thwart these kinds of attacks, limit
the extent of the attacks? I say that in part because my guess
is that the top graduates from California Institute of
Technology (CalTech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and others, they tend to go into the private sector or
their own firms or become hackers themselves, and we are not
able to attract the same level of talent into government as
maybe in the private sector.
Do we have the skill that we need to be able to confront
what we are facing internationally?
Mr. Wales. I think this is a question that I think all of
us can answer in somewhat different ways because we have a lot
of efforts to ensure that we can recruit and retain the right
level of talent. There are a lot of interesting things that
people can only do in the U.S. Government, and that does
attract some of the best and the brightest. I am happy that I
lead a workforce of people who are extremely talented, who can
do things that no one else can do when it comes to hunting
threats and detecting the adversary.
But part of our strength is our collaboration from the
Federal Government with the private sector, with key
international partners and law enforcement, defense
communities. That allows us to do things that other countries
cannot, to bring in that expertise. The fact that we have
companies like FireEye who were able to detect the SolarWinds
incident and bring that information to the Federal Government
early, as soon as they detected it, and allowed us to do
additional actions to find that activity elsewhere is part of
the strength of our system, and it is one that we rely upon. We
are meeting regularly with the private sector to gain their
insights in what they are seeing, including when we have
significant incidents.
The first weekend after the Microsoft Exchange
vulnerabilities came out, we were on a call with key private
sector members talking about what they were seeing in the
United States, what they were seeing globally, and how it could
in form our protective posture.
Senator Romney. I just wonder whether we have or whether we
should engage one or two or three of the top firms in the
country to look at our systems and to lay out for us a strategy
for how we are going to deal with what is apparently going to
be an ongoing threat.
Let me ask on a different front, are we as good at offense
as they are? Any one of the three of you can answer this, but
the Russians and the Chinese, and, well, the North Koreans and
Iranians to a lesser extent, I believe, but the Russians and
the Chinese have massive resources devoted to attacking our
systems. Our corporate systems are attacked thousands upon
thousands of times a day.
Are we as good at this as they are on an offensive basis?
Do we have versions of the same things we are talking about
here having attacked us? Are we accomplishing the same things
there, or are we just not up to the same level they are in
terms of the hacking into systems?
Ms. Ugoretz. Senator, I think you would need a different
set of agencies here in order to address the offense question,
and that would likely need to be in a classified setting.
Senator Romney. Can you describe which agencies it would
be, or is that also classified?
Ms. Ugoretz. I do not think I would want to specify, but--
--
Senator Romney. OK.
Ms. Ugoretz. I think members of our intelligence community
and Department of Defense (DOD) would be chief among those.
Senator Romney. All right. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I will return the time to you.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Romney.
We are waiting for a couple Senators. I think they are on
their way right now. Ranking Member, do you have a question?
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Romney, I
appreciate your line of questioning.
I want to talk about EINSTEIN for a moment. The statutory
authorization for the EINSTEIN program expires in December
2022, so it gives us an opportunity to take a look at this.
Mr. Wales, I think we can all agree that hackers behind the
SolarWinds attack were very sophisticated and hard to detect,
but, clearly, someone was able to detect them, or we would not
be here today. Unfortunately, it was, again, the private
sector, not government.
I think it is important to start by discussing the
limitations of the Department of Homeland Security's cyber
intrusion detection program, EINSTEIN, and asking why it did
not detect this threat and how we can improve it.
Mr. Wales, could you assess EINSTEIN's current performance?
Mr. Wales. Sure, and I would say, Senator, that EINSTEIN
continues to perform, as it was designed, and it can protect
against the things that it was designed to protect against. I
will note that EINSTEIN is an intrusion detection system, which
means it is looking at the perimeter of a network and examining
traffic that is going from outside the network to inside the
network.
Senator Portman. It was not designed to detect unknown
threats like the SolarWinds attack, correct?
Mr. Wales. It was not designed on threats. That being said,
it was also--and, again, EINSTEIN is not just one capability.
There is a suite of different types of capabilities all at the
perimeter, all looking at that traffic moving into and out of
Federal networks.
Senator Portman. It was not the first to detect this
threat?
Mr. Wales. I would say that there was no intrusion----
Senator Portman. It was not the first to detect this
threat, correct?
Mr. Wales. Correct, but I would just point out that there
was no intrusion detection or intrusion protection system
anywhere that detected this threat. FireEye did not use an
intrusion detection system to detect this threat, and they
could not. It just would not work that way. Part of what I
indicated earlier was that we need to supplement what EINSTEIN
does looking at the perimeter of networks with what is
happening inside the network.
Senator Portman. Can EINSTEIN scan for intrusions on cloud
environments like Microsoft Office 365 or Amazon Web Services?
Mr. Wales. No.
Senator Portman. Within the government are you seeing
increased use of cloud environments like Microsoft Office 365
and Amazon Web Services for IT services?
Mr. Wales. Yes.
Senator Portman. What about other encrypted Internet
traffic? Can EINSTEIN scan all encrypted Internet traffic going
to and from government agencies?
Mr. Wales. So it can see where that traffic is coming from
and going to, but it cannot look inside of that traffic. That
is one of the key areas why we need to move away from perimeter
security for that level of intrusion protection and move onto
the host, because when you are deploying on the host level, on
those work stations and servers, there the information is
unencrypted, and those systems can detect whether activity is
anomalous.
Senator Portman. So you would say it cannot scan all that
encrypted data going to and fro. Is that correct?
Mr. Wales. Correct.
Senator Portman. And much of the Internet traffic these
days is encrypted, isn't it?
Mr. Wales. More than 90 percent of the traffic in the
Federal Government is encrypted.
Senator Portman. Yes. I believe the urgency here is clear,
and I think you have stated it, that the statutory authorize
for EINSTEIN expiring next year gives us a chance to do this.
It seems like the significant limitations you have talked about
means we need to work together to address the next
authorization. Would you agree with that?
Mr. Wales. Yes, I think we need to keep the pieces of
EINSTEIN that continue to work and provide significant value,
and we need to transition those areas that do not to different
programs. The American Rescue Act money will provide a
downpayment to start doing that.
Senator Portman. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Portman.
The Chair recognizes Senator Sinema. Senator Sinema, you
are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR SINEMA
Senator Sinema. Thank you, Chairman Peters, and thank you
to Ranking Member Portman for holding this important hearing.
Thanks to the witnesses for being here today.
The SolarWinds attack targeted high-value government and
technology networks, and the more recent attack against
Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities victimized many small and
medium-sized businesses. In Arizona, the city of Kingman is
still recovering from a criminal cyber attack against its
computer systems that occurred in late February. This shows how
expansive cyber attacks have become and how damaging the
results can be and the amount of time and resources needed to
recover. So this is a very timely hearing.
The Federal Government must do more to help communities and
entities such as Kingman to improve its own systems to ensure
Federal entities have the tools they need to prepare for and
respond to future cyber attacks.
My first question is for Mr. DeRusha. We recently heard
from the Government Accountability Office about its latest
High-Risk List. Ensuring the cybersecurity of our Nation was
listed as needing significant attention. What immediate actions
will you take as the new Chief Information Security Officer to
address outstanding recommendations from GAO and any findings
from the investigations into the SolarWinds attack to help
agencies better secure Federal systems and protect cyber
critical infrastructure and sensitive data?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, thank you for the question.
Fortunately, this Committee supported giving us a downpayment
in the American Recovery Plan to start on this crucial work.
With the $1 billion of investment in the Technology
Modernization Fund, we are going to be able to start looking
top-down at some of the High-Risk IT systems across government
and start to be really able to tackle some of these persistent
long-term challenges that we have been aware of but just have
not had the resources to address.
Also, the monies that are going toward CISA and GSA, we are
going to start looking toward developing managed security
services where valuable and also ensuring that we are making
investments in the agencies through the annual budget process
to fill key capability gaps that we have identified through the
SolarWinds incident.
We have a lot of work planned, and we are looking forward
to working collaboratively with CISA to implement across all
the Federal agencies.
Senator Sinema. Thank you.
My next question is for both Mr. Wales and Mr. DeRusha. We
are increasingly reliant on interconnected devices and networks
that help manage critical areas such as transportation, health
care, and energy. How can we avoid concentrating cyber attack
risk within a more specialized supply chain of manufacturers,
software providers, and telecommunications firms? If we cannot,
how do we minimize risks across these critical supply chains?
Mr. Wales. Thank you. So we do a lot of work--I would say
at the outset that, changing the market is challenging, and in
many cases the reason why there is concentrated risk are market
conditions that are largely outside of the Federal Government's
ability to control. But we do try to work hard, particularly
with the vendor community, who makes a lot of those industrial
control systems (ICS), the systems that manage critical
infrastructure and operate the systems that we all rely upon.
We work with the vendor community to strengthen the security
that is built into those devices, and we actually have a lot of
work focused in the industrial control system space with the
owners and operators of those systems to identify what
additional protections and security they need to have in place,
because cybersecurity of industrial control systems is
challenging. It is a unique discipline. Of all the workforce
challenges we have in the cybersecurity community, it is
magnified a couple of timefold because of the unique nature of
industrial control environments, but it is an area that we have
a focused effort on. CISA released the strategic plan focusing
on securing ICS systems late last year, and we are working now
with the White House and DOE and others on additional work to
see what we can do to get better insights and provide
additional expertise to help secure those systems.
Senator Sinema. Thank you.
My next question is for Mr. DeRusha. OMB's Federal
cybersecurity reskilling program is meant to bring more
cybersecurity training to Federal employees. However, placing
graduates has been a challenge because they often end up
qualified for cybersecurity jobs a grade lower than their
current position. What actions do Congress and the
administration need to take to ensure that employees who gain
these skills are rewarded with a fair salary and appropriate
grade level?
Mr. DeRusha. Senator, I can just say that I am aware of
that challenge, and it is definitely going to be a priority of
our office, within the Office of the Federal CIO, to work with
the Office of Personnel Management to explore all the current
hiring authorities and incentives that we have in place and
ensure that agencies are using them and understand how to use
them. So you can expect that we will absolutely be prioritizing
this.
Senator Sinema. Thank you.
My next question is for Mr. Wales. Mr. Wales, a key way to
combat a cyber attack is effective information sharing, but we
continue to hear from some private sector entities about
frustrations that they are expected to share information, but
the Federal Government is slow to reciprocate. What are your
recommendations for incentivizing companies to notify the
Federal Government when their networks are compromised? How is
CISA working to improve its information sharing back to the
private sector?
Mr. Wales. Sure. Thank you for that. I will start by saying
that we actually have received a lot of positive feedback from
companies that have come forward recently to us and to the
Federal Government, and I want to thank those companies,
because, frankly, cybersecurity requires a collective defense,
and we are only successful if people are willing to come
forward and work with us.
I would also say that we have worked hard over the past
year to improve the speed at which we can provide back
actionable information when we receive information from the
private sector. Again, it may not be information back to that
same company, but the information that they provide is going to
raise everyone else's baseline. When we receive information
from a company, we are then going to share that in an
anonymized way more broadly so that other companies are not
victimized in the same way. I think both the SolarWinds case as
well as Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, the time at which
we were notified about an incident and provided information
from potential victims to the speed at which we were able to
get information out broadly, publicly, is now measured in hours
and days and not weeks and months.
And so that is where I am focusing our efforts because I
think it is the place where we can have the greatest impact,
and the value proposition back to those companies is that today
you are sharing this information, but tomorrow you are going to
want other people to share information so that you can benefit
from it, so that you are not victimized by the next cyber
attack because someone else is sharing information with the
Federal Government allowing us to get it all out, allowing us
to enable this collective defense.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Sinema.
Senator Hawley, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HAWLEY
Senator Hawley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to the
witnesses for being here.
Ms. Ugoretz, could I just start with you? You wrote in your
testimony that the adversary's goal is not just to compromise
the network; it is to use that compromise in furtherance of a
larger objective. In this case, could you give us a sense of
what we think that larger objective is or was?
Ms. Ugoretz. Yes, Senator, thank you for the question. I
think the intelligence community and the Unified Coordination
Group that is coordinating the response to this incident has
said in its public statements that we assess that the intent of
adversary behind this activity was for espionage purposes, to
obtain information that would further their insight and their
activities.
Senator Hawley. Do we have a sense, have other nations been
targeted as well, or do we think that we were the only ones?
For instance, is it possible that some of our European partners
and allies could have been targeted and have yet not discovered
it and do not know about it? Or do we think that this was a
stand-alone attack directed at the United States?
Ms. Ugoretz. So based on what we have seen thus far, the
majority of the activity appears to have been directed at the
United States; however, we are aware of instances and
information shared with us from foreign partners where some of
their networks were affected as well.
Senator Hawley. That is interesting. I noticed that in
February we also uncovered evidence of a separate parallel
attack on SolarWinds software, but this time from a group of
hackers in China. Do we think that this was coincidence or was
it coordinated? Is there anything you can tell us about the
timing of this, coming from what appears to be a different
source?
Ms. Ugoretz. What I can tell you is that some of the press
reports about SolarWinds-related China-based activity were
inaccurate. For me to go into those inaccuracies would require
a classified setting.
Senator Hawley. Understood.
Mr. Wales, just on this subject, let me ask you about one
of the reports about these attacks. Some of the reports
indicate that hackers targeted the National Finance Center
(NFC), sort of the processing of payroll information--a center
which processes payroll information for Federal workers. Of
course, you can imagine the compromise in personal data that
that would entail.
What lessons, I am wondering, should we take from that
specifically? Do we need to take further steps, for instance,
to rethink how the government stores and protects personal
data, especially of that kind?
Mr. Wales. I will say two things. First is that reporting
was inaccurate. The National Financing Center was not targeted,
as far as we know----
Senator Hawley. At any time? First or second----
Mr. Wales. Not as part of this campaign or the separate
campaign, and we have had a number of discussions with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA) that manages the National
Finance Center and do not believe that the NFC was targeted.
But, second, data loss prevention is one of the key
capabilities that we are attempting to work through in Phase 3
and Phase 4 of our Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM)
program. Protecting sensitive government data is among the
highest priorities we have, and it is certainly kind of on our
road map for where we want to focus our efforts.
Senator Hawley. Let me ask you an adjacent question. You
wrote in your testimony, Mr. Wales, that due to the global
pandemic, the risk landscape has shifted dramatically over the
past year. Can you give us a sense of why that is true? What is
the difference? Is it more remote work? What has led to the
threat environment?
Mr. Wales. The digital transformation that we went through,
where there was much more significant remote work, many
workplaces have changed their operating environment, they are
moving more to cloud-based infrastructure. That movement has
both strengths and weaknesses. In many cases you are moving to
an environment that is managed by professionals who can spend
full-time making sure that that is secure. But, on the other
hand, you need to make sure that you are doing it right, that
you are configuring those systems. It introduces new
vulnerabilities that your system administrators may not have
had experience working with before. This change has increased
and changed our risk calculus, and it is going to require the
Federal Government to work with the private sector to adjust.
Senator Hawley. Just on the question of the
vulnerabilities, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently
reported that some of the techniques used by the hackers were
the equivalent, the digital equivalent of a spy's disguise. Can
you give us a sense of how the attackers can disguise
themselves on government networks? What does that amount to?
Mr. Wales. I am going to defer this one to Tonya. I believe
this is more referring to them using U.S.-based infrastructure
as opposed to operating from overseas.
Ms. Ugoretz. That might be part of it. I think there are
different ways that adversaries can try to blend into
legitimate traffic. Some of that is by using, for example,
virtual private networks (VPN) which might be carrying traffic
not only from the malicious actors but from legitimate actors
as well. Brandon also referred, I think, in his testimony to
the fact that adversaries do try to use domestic infrastructure
because it is more trusted by network defenders. That is not
surprising. Adversaries try to avoid detection by our services
that focus on overseas collection as well as the FBI who
collects here domestically. But we are always working very
closely with our IC partners who are involved in both foreign
collection as well as our focus on the domestic collection to
try to close that gap and understand how the adversaries are
trying to evade us.
Senator Hawley. Understood. Very good. Thank you all.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hawley.
Senator Padilla, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PADILLA
Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank
the three of you for your work and your testimony today. I will
have many questions for all of you. I will raise a couple of
issues with Mr. Wales.
My first question is: Can you shine some light on why CISA
might not always be aware of incidents or issues in agencies or
with their contractors? I phrase that after reflecting on some
of your testimony where you shed light on the need for broader
visibility for CISA across Federal agencies and even non-
government entities. A general question with the precise
follow-up of is there some reason that contractual restrictions
might limit our ability to respond to a cyber attack from
Russia, or any other adversary, for that matter?
Mr. Wales. Let me first say I want to thank you personally
for your partnership with our agency during your time as
Secretary of State in California on our Protect 2020 efforts.
On your specific questions, so agencies are required to
provide CISA with information on incidents affecting their
information or their infrastructure. So whether it is a
contractor for that agency where their data may have been
compromised or it is the agency's network itself that has had a
security incident, they are required under Federal reporting
guidelines to provide that information to CISA. So we would
have perspective on incidents.
What I was referring to in terms of visibility is more what
is happening on that network, the systems on that network. For
example--and Chris alluded to kind of Excel-based spreadsheets
going back and forth--when we want to know how many SolarWinds
devices are on Federal networks, we have to do a data call and
ask each Federal agency to tally them up and send them into us.
They may have their own tools inside the network that gives
them visibility on what those systems look like, but CISA does
not have access into those. We do not have that level of detail
of knowledge into their network.
When we want to operate and go hunt on their networks, we
need to have their permission to deploy our sensors, to deploy
additional agents onto their systems so that we can see the
cybersecurity information.
We want to move to an environment where security
information is available to CISA. We can use that for alerting,
we can use that for hunting and do that in a way that is
collaborative and cooperative, because the strength of our
relationship with those agencies should not be sacrificed.
There may be some small areas where there are contractual
requirements that may need to evolve. This is an area that we
are actually working with the interagency on now about how we
need to evolve certain contracts to make sure information can
be shared appropriately, and we expect guidance to come out on
that in the very near future.
Senator Padilla. OK. Please let us know how this Committee
can help you in that regard, and I believe on the sharing of
information, the data calls you reference may be separate but
runs parallel to the dynamic of OMB has definitions of ``major
incident.'' A lot of times it is left up to the specific
departments and agencies to make the call on their own of
whether an incident has reached that threshold or not, so
another area of work----
Mr. Wales. [Off microphone] [Inaudible]. Reporting to us is
a lower threshold. The very major incident is different than
the reporting guidelines for when they need to report security
incidents to----
Senator Padilla. Right, so I did not think that is what you
were referencing, but acknowledging that dynamic.
A quick comment on supply chain and then another sort of
40,000-foot question for you. I look forward to working with
the Chair and other Members of the Committee to follow up on
the supply chain issues, concerns, and need. I just want to for
the record state that it is not just a software issue. It is
also a hardware issue. It is also a middleware issue. You know,
much higher stakes in this discussion than the toilet paper
supply chain early in the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)
pandemic, but I think, given that example, people understand
what we are talking about here from a national security
perspective.
My big question of today is this: Can you speak to the
broader nature of what we refer to as the ``SolarWinds
attack''? I mean, it is commonly referred to as the
``SolarWinds attack,'' but the more we learn about it, the more
we recognize it was much more sophisticated, much more
multidimensional, much more pervasive of an incident. What
other avenues did the Russians use that we have not been
talking about enough?
Mr. Wales. Sure. Senator, that is a good question. What I
can say is the adversary used a variety of techniques to
compromise networks. The most common was the compromise of the
SolarWinds devices, but we are aware of their use of other
techniques. We believe right now that most of those techniques
are more traditional cyber attacks, password spraying, brute-
force attacks on networks to try to gain access to the inside.
They may have used vulnerabilities in commonly used VPN
software and others to compromise networks.
But what I would say is the hallmark of the campaign was
their ability to pivot once they gained access inside of that
network to compromise authentication systems and then use that
compromised authentication system to gain broad access to data
stores that they wanted, largely in Microsoft Office 365 cloud
but at times critical data stores on networks.
I will talk, just mention as an example, because the
company itself had talked about this publicly, but when FireEye
was compromised, the adversary was looking for their red-
teaming tools, the tools they use to test the security of some
of their client networks. That is kind of an example of where
they are going after sensitive information, but in other cases
maybe other stores of data. It was all because they compromised
those systems that managed trust and identity on networks. They
had a couple of different pathways to get there, but that was
really the hallmark of this campaign.
Senator Padilla. Thank you. I will just end with, other
members have asked questions and made comments relative to the
need to continuously improve interagency and intergovernmental
communication and collaboration, others from our prior
experience the need for not just Federal but Federal, State,
local, and private sector communication collaboration. Part of
what is startling from this SolarWinds incident is techniques
and tactics that we have not seen before. It truly is an all-
hands-on-deck moment to be able to stay one step ahead of the
bad guys, if you will. It underscores the need for improving
our models for centralizing a lot of this review and sort of
monitoring the bad traffic or, short of that, much better and
real-time communication collaboration.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Padilla.
Senator Ossoff, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR OSSOFF
Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
our panel today. I am grateful for your work and for your
testimony.
Ms. Ugoretz, would you say that cybersecurity in this
context, where it has been reported in unclassified settings,
including confirmed in this hearing today, that the principal
objective of the threat appeared to be espionage, that
cybersecurity in this context is a counterintelligence effort?
Ms. Ugoretz. Speaking from my perspective, I am a career
intelligence analyst for almost 20 years, so a lot of my work
has been focused on not only getting intelligence to the
decisionmakers who need to act on it, but understanding the
motives behind various threat actors. When it comes to cyber
threats, I think it is important to not consider cyber and
cyber threat intelligence as distinct from the people who are
actually using it. You are correct that among those who are
using it, in addition cyber criminals are foreign intelligence
services and elements of foreign adversary governments who are
using cyber intrusions as one of many means in order to support
their strategic objectives, which may be to gain insight and
information into U.S. policy perspectives and priorities or for
other purposes.
So in that context, yes, I would consider how foreign
adversaries use cyber intrusions to support their ends as a
counterintelligence concern.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Ugoretz, for that answer. It
would be correct, would it not--and, of course, correct me if I
am wrong--to state that when it comes to counterintelligence in
the context of human intelligence, the FBI is clearly the
agency in the lead within the Federal Government, of course, in
collaboration with elements in the intelligence community and
collaboration with State and local law enforcement where
appropriate, but counterintelligence from a human intelligence
standpoint is the FBI's responsibility. Is that correct?
Ms. Ugoretz. I believe counterintelligence, writ large,
here domestically and not only confined to human intelligence,
yes, is under the FBI's authority.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Ugoretz. Given the scope of
the apparent breach and the number of Federal agencies affected
and vulnerable to this attack, was this a counterintelligence
failure?
Ms. Ugoretz. Senator, again, kind of drawing on my
experience as a career intelligence analyst--and I will just
note I joined the FBI as an intelligence analyst in November
2001 when the term ``intelligence failure'' I think became a
part of our vernacular, so I do understand the context of your
question and the concern.
Based on that perspective, when I think of an intelligence
failure, I think of a few different things. The first is a
failure of imagination or of forward-leaning analysis that goes
beyond the fragmentary intelligence that we as the U.S.
Government have at any point in time in order to be able to
forecast a specific threat or incident.
Second, I think about a failure to share. There are many
different U.S. Government agencies who have pieces of the
intelligence puzzle, and especially with cyber, the private
sector has one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle about what
outcome adversaries are doing against private networks. So that
is the second way I think about intelligence failures as a
failure to share what dots we have.
Third, I think about failure to connect the disparate
pieces we have that I just described.
In the case of the SolarWinds incident, none of those three
things happened. Information that the U.S. Government held on
this adversary and threat intentions was shared across the
interagency. There were no assessments that were not shared. In
fact, publicly both the FBI and CISA have warned of a variety
of adversaries, including Russia and China, both attempting and
succeeding to conduct supply chain compromises, including, most
notably, the Russians with the NotPetya compromise, which is
still considered the most globally damaging----
Senator Ossoff. Ms. Ugoretz, if I might, and the reason
that I am asking this question in this way, if in the human
intelligence context there were compromise so broadly across a
range of Federal agencies, I think it is safe to say--and my
question was: Is this a counterintelligence failure? We have
established that cybersecurity in this context is a
counterintelligence mission. If a human intelligence threat
penetrated this many Federal agencies in order to exfiltrate
this potentially degree of sensitive data, I think we would
unambiguously view that as a failure of counterintelligence, an
operational failure. That is not expecting perfection. We
recognize that in the cyber context offense is cheaper than
defense, that the threat is persistent, and that there will be
breaches of U.S. networks. But I find it troubling that we
cannot simply establish at this hearing that operationally this
kind of breach is a counterintelligence failure.
Ms. Ugoretz. Senator, intelligence and intelligence
analysis and the prevention of threats requires the integration
of information from a variety of sources derived not only
domestically but from our foreign intelligence collection as
well, which members of the intelligence community other than
the FBI conduct. As you are likely aware, our insight into
adversary threat activity, especially among our most
sophisticated cyber adversaries and foreign intelligence
services, is fragmentary. The FBI, in order to pursue
collection on those fragments, requires information on which we
can predicate that collection. So we cannot, for example,
conduct wholesale collection on a broader class of U.S.
domestic infrastructure or U.S. domestic agencies just in case
we see something. It requires those building blocks of
intelligence which the entire U.S. intelligence community is
responsible for in order to be able to direct that intelligence
and that insight.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you, Ms. Ugoretz, for engaging in
this discussion.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Ossoff.
I would like to thank our witnesses once again for your
testimony here today and taking our questions. It is clear that
we are dealing with a major threat, a threat that continues to
grow but requires a very complex response, and it is also clear
we are not there yet and have a long ways to go.
This will be a continuing conversation. We are going to
continue to hold hearings in this Committee. We are going to
continue to be meeting directly with folks in all of the
respective agencies as we look at ways that Congress can
support your efforts to protect our networks, both with the
Federal Government and broadly across the economy. I speak for
all the Members of the Committee. We look forward to your
engagement in this process because it is a necessary one. We
are confident we can deal with it, but it is going to take a
lot of effort. We are going to work together in a bipartisan
way in this Committee to achieve that end.
With that, the hearing record will remain open for 15 days,
until April 2nd at 5 p.m., for the submission of statements and
questions for the record.
This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:03 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
PREVENTION, RESPONSE, AND RECOVERY:
IMPROVING FEDERAL CYBERSECURITY POST-SOLARWINDS
----------
TUESDAY, MAY 11, 2021
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., via
Webex and in room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon.
Gary C. Peters, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Peters, Carper, Hassan, Sinema, Rosen,
Ossoff, Portman, Johnson, Lankford, Romney, Scott, and Hawley.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN PETERS
Chairman Peters. The Committee will come to order.
First, I want to thank each of our witnesses for joining us
today for this very important discussion, the second in a
series of hearings that Ranking Member Portman and I are
conducting to help bolster our Nation's cyber defenses and
ensure that the American people are safe from increasingly
sophisticated online attacks.
Although it can often be difficult to understand the
complexity and the severity of some of these attacks from the
outside, they have a significant cost on our national security.
In many cases, these attacks can also affect our daily lives,
as we saw with the recent ransomware attack on the Colonial
Pipeline that was reported over this weekend.
Officials are continuing to investigate exactly what
happened. But the extraordinary measures the company took to
shut down the pipeline and the possible ripple effects that
will likely have on gas prices and our economy down the line
shows that attackers will always look to exploit
vulnerabilities.
We must continue working to strengthen our cybersecurity
defenses and response plans to prevent these types of attacks
from occurring in the first place and prevent them from having
catastrophic consequences on our daily lives.
That is why I will continue to push for common-sense
legislation to strengthen our response to these hostile
assaults, whether they come from foreign adversaries or
criminal actors that seek to harm our country.
That is why I worked to secure a $650 million investment as
part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to help the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the
Federal Government prevent adversaries and bad actors from
hacking institutions and Federal agencies that are absolutely
essential to our pandemic response.
I have also introduced legislation with Ranking Member
Portman to provide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
with additional resources and encourage better coordination to
address attacks that risk the safety and the security of
Americans.
While legislation and needed reforms will certainly help
bolster our national security against these increasingly
sophisticated threats, we also need to rethink how we approach
cyber warfare.
Our foreign adversaries, like the Chinese and Russian
Governments, do not rest. To successfully thwart their
relentless assaults on the American system, we need to
recognize they do not view the Federal Government as separate
agencies, but as one single target.
That is what made the SolarWinds hack such a significant
incident. A foreign adversary was able to infiltrate and spy on
nine Federal agencies and dozens of private companies all at
the same time, using the same vulnerability to access troves of
sensitive data, including the emails of the Acting Secretary of
Homeland Security at the time.
An attack like that requires a comprehensive approach, and
we cannot leave individual Federal agencies to fend for
themselves against attacks from nation-states.
Agencies need to better anticipate their individual risk,
and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) need to take a
governmentwide approach to assessing cybersecurity threats so
that we can better prioritize our resources to defend Federal
information systems.
Federal agencies must also ensure they are providing
Congress with timely and relevant information in the event of
major incidents so that we can work with our Executive Branch
colleagues to help provide the resources and authorities that
they need to address these threats.
That is why I am continuing my push to strengthen the
Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), so that
Congress can ensure our cybersecurity apparatus is working
hand-in-hand across the Federal Government to support a
coordinated response to cyber intrusions, while providing
transparency.
Today's hearing will focus on the safety and security of
our Federal agencies and how our government's lead
cybersecurity experts are working to protect the information
systems of departments that are critical to safeguarding our
national security and providing essential services to the
American people.
Today's witnesses are uniquely qualified to help the
Committee understand how agencies are assessing the damage of
these recent breaches, what we need to do to combat these
threats, how to improve transparency with Congress, and the
challenges they have faced in recovering from these attacks.
Protecting the American people from these ever-evolving
attacks, especially in the face of a pandemic that has moved
our lives increasingly online, requires immediate action on a
bipartisan basis. I know this Committee can work together to
tackle these enormous challenges.
With that, I turn it over to Senator Portman, our Ranking
Member, and thank him for joining me to address cyber attacks
and to secure our Nation. Senator Portman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN
Senator Portman. Thank you, Chairman Peters. I have
appreciated our bipartisan work over the years together on
improving Federal cybersecurity, and I look forward to
continuing the partnership. You just mentioned some of the
efforts that are underway. As many of you know, we are in the
process of writing legislation right now to address some of
these issues we will talk about today.
Today is an opportunity to really focus deeply on some of
these attacks that have happened over the last several months.
We already had one hearing on the SolarWinds hack, and today we
want to continue that oversight with some witnesses from the
agencies to talk about how we can learn from these incidents to
improve our cyber defenses in the future. I look forward to
hearing the perspective of these agency officials on the ground
as they try to fend off these cyber attacks.
In the last 6 months, hackers have executed four major
cyber campaigns against U.S. Government agencies and private
companies. Those are four that we know of, and I say that
because many of these attacks occurred months ago, and we only
learned of them more recently. SolarWinds is one; Microsoft
Exchange, Pulse Secure, and, most recently, of course, the
Colonial Pipeline.
The SolarWinds and Pulse Secure virtual private network
(VPN) attacks targeted Federal agencies, and yet it was private
sector companies that discovered them. That should be
concerning to all of us. Despite all the increased funding
appropriated for cybersecurity and the bipartisan legislation
we have worked on here in this Committee, not one of these
Federal intrusions was discovered by the Federal Government.
Cyber attacks are going to continue to be a threat, and the
Federal Government needs to be able to identify those threats
and defend against them.
We continue to learn about these attacks. Here are some of
the details we already know.
First, after our last hearing, the U.S. Government
officially attributed the SolarWinds hack to Russia's Foreign
Intelligence Service (SVR). So we have learned that since our
last hearing. SVR was very patient and selected its targets
carefully and compromised a trusted link in the software supply
chain. It disguised its activity and used stealth techniques
that evaded detection. Because of that, it took more than a
year to detect the attack, a lifetime to be able to do damage
for sophisticated adversaries like these.
Second, we know that the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange
attacks were broad. Within the Federal Government, the
SolarWinds attack hit agencies holding some of our most
sensitive data and national security secrets, including the
agencies before us today. I look forward to the testimony of
our witnesses about the impacts of recent attacks on their
agencies.
The SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange attacks also impacted
the private sector, even cybersecurity firms meant to protect
our systems. For example, FireEye, the company that discovered
the SolarWinds hack, was breached itself. FireEye is one of the
firms folks call on when they discover a breach, so here the
very people we call on when we get hacked got hacked
themselves.
We are still in the very early stages of learning about the
Pulse Secure attack, but recent reports indicate that at least
five Federal agencies were compromised in that attack. So we
are learning as we go, and it is concerning.
Third, the fact that the Federal Government was hacked is
not surprising to us. In June 2019, we issued a report from the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). I was chair of
that Committee at the time; Senator Carper was the ranking
Democrat. That report detailed the extensive cybersecurity
vulnerabilities of eight specific Federal agencies. Many of
those vulnerabilities had remained unresolved for a decade.
More than a year later, three of those eight agencies were
seriously compromised by the SolarWinds attack: DHS, State, and
the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). State is not
here, but HHS is here, and we look forward to a dialog about
why HHS did not declare a major incident under the Federal
Information Security Modernization Act. We talked earlier about
FISMA and the need to reform it, but under current FISMA it
seems to me that should have been declared a major incident.
I am concerned that members of DHS' cybersecurity team who
hunt threats in foreign countries and the former DHS Secretary
were compromised in the SolarWinds attack and that we learned
about this not from DHS, not from CISA, but from news reports.
Mr. Wales, I look forward to a discussion of how CISA
specifically, which is part of DHS, was impacted. Again, we
will refer later in the questions to those specific news
reports I am talking about.
Finally, it is clear that cyber attacks are going to keep
coming. Last week, cyber criminals attacked Colonial Pipeline,
the company responsible for providing about 45 percent, almost
half of the east coast fuel. This is potentially the most
substantial and damaging attack on U.S. critical infrastructure
ever. It shows that cyber attacks can have tangible, real-world
consequences.
Although our witnesses today are here to discuss the
Federal cybersecurity side, I think it is important that we
hear from CISA about what we know so far about this attack on
the Colonial Pipeline and what we should be doing to deter,
detect, and respond to attacks like this in the future.
These four recent attacks have demonstrated not only the
weakness of our defenses, but also the persistence and
sophistication of our adversaries. In response, we have to take
a hard look at the Federal cybersecurity strategy,
capabilities, and leadership and discuss what changes are
necessary to prevent and mitigate attacks like this in the
future.
At our last hearing, I asked our witnesses who is
ultimately accountable. Who is responsible for Federal
cybersecurity? The witnesses were not able to give a clear
answer, which is troubling. Under current law, each agency is
ultimately responsible for securing its own networks, which is
why we have asked the agency Chief Information Security
Officers (CISOs), to give their perspective today. But CISA
must also have visibility across Federal civilian agencies to
be able to do what Congress created it to do: secure the
networks of the Federal Government.
Congress also created the position of National Cyber
Director in the White House to coordinate implementation of
national cyber policy and strategy as recommended by the
Solarium Commission. The Biden administration has now nominated
Chris Inglis, and I understand his paperwork is being
finalized. It appears that the Deputy National Security Adviser
for Cyber and Emerging Technology, Anne Neuberger, has also
taken a leading role in handling cyber attacks based on
briefings we have received.
I believe that a single point of accountability is
necessary. I think that single point of accountability for
Federal cyber attacks overseeing all of this, the individual
agency efforts and CISA's work to support them, is crucial to
ensure we have proper responsibility and accountability.
I appreciate the witnesses being here today. Again, Mr.
Chairman, I look forward to their testimony on all these
important issues.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Portman.
It is the practice of the Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to swear in witnesses,
so if you will stand and raise your right hand. Do you swear
that the testimony that you will give before this Committee
will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,
so help you, God?
Mr. Wales. I do.
Mr. Higgins. I do.
Ms. Vogel. I do.
Chairman Peters. You may be seated.
Our first witness today is Brandon Wales, the Acting
Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency. Prior to becoming Acting Director, Mr. Wales was CISA's
first Executive Director. Mr. Wales has also served in multiple
positions within the Secretary's office for DHS, including
Senior Counselor to the Secretary for Cyber and Resilience,
Acting Deputy Chief of Staff, and the Acting Chief of Staff for
the Department. Prior to joining the Department, Mr. Wales
served as a national security aide to United States Senator Jon
Kyl and as a senior associate at a Washington-based foreign
policy and national security think tank.
Welcome back to the Committee, Mr. Wales. Always good to
see you. I will now recognize you for your five-minute opening
remarks.
TESTIMONY OF BRANDON WALES,\1\ ACTING DIRECTOR, CYBERSECURITY
AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY
Mr. Wales. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Peters,
Ranking Member Portman, and Members of the Committee. I
appreciate the opportunity to testify today regarding the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's response to
the SolarWinds supply chain compromise and our broader efforts
to enhance the security and resilience of Federal networks
going forward.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Wales appear in the Appendix on
page 117.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As both of you pointed out in your opening statements,
cyber attacks on our Nation's infrastructure are growing more
sophisticated, frequent, and aggressive. Malicious cyber actors
today are dedicating time and resources toward researching,
stealing, and exploiting vulnerabilities, using more complex
attacks to avoid detection, and developing new techniques to
target information and communications technology supply chains.
We witnessed this firsthand through the SolarWinds supply
chain compromise and the exploitation of Microsoft Exchange and
Pulse Secure vulnerabilities. The SolarWinds supply chain
compromise should have served as a wake-up call to our
adversaries' increasing interest in targeting supply chain
vulnerabilities. This highly sophisticated operation attributed
to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, involved the
compromise of trusted software updates to inject malicious code
into thousands of victim organizations. The primary objective
of the SVR in this Committee appears to be gaining access to
sensitive but unclassified communications and to identify
additional opportunities to compromise information technology
(IT) supply chains.
In response, on December 13th the National Security Council
(NSC) staff stood up the Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG)
comprised of CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),
with support from the National Security Agency (NSA). As the
lead for asset response in the Federal civilian space, CISA
provided technical assistance to affected entities who
requested it as they identified and mitigated potential
compromises.
CISA's work in response to this campaign fell under four
primary lines of effort: scoping the campaign, sharing
information and detection techniques, supporting short-term
remediation, and providing guidance and assistance in long-term
network recovery.
My written statement provides a more detailed outline of
our response and recovery efforts, so I would like to take this
opportunity to highlight areas of progress and what we believe
is the way forward for a more secure Nation.
First, throughout SolarWinds and the other recent cyber
incidents, there has been unprecedented and robust
collaboration between the public and private sector. Industry
identified the threats and informed us with little delay. In
the case of the exchange vulnerabilities, we were able to work
together to take collective action to mitigate potential risks.
The government provided the forum, but industry partnership
allowed us to quickly reduce the population of susceptible
servers and notify potential victims at a scale that the
government alone could not achieve.
We must build on this success and adapt to the increasing
dynamic threat landscape. Since industry often sees malicious
cyber activity first, we must continue to deepen operational
collaboration with our industry partners.
At CISA, one of our top priorities this year is standing up
the recently authorized Joint Cyber Planning Office (JCPO), a
recommendation from the Cyberspace Solarium Commission that was
authorized in the most recent National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA). I want to thank this Committee for its support not
only of this provision, but of all the cyber-focused provisions
included in the NDAA that will continue to advance and
strengthen our Federal cyber posture.
The Joint Cyber Planning Office will build on the success
of our recent operational collaboration, unifying public and
private sector cyber incident planning, and integrating the
execution of the cyber defense operations conducted under
CISA's asset response mission.
Second, and echoing some comments from the Chairman, we
must rethink our approach to cybersecurity. Releasing alerts,
deploying incident response teams, sharing best practices are
important tools. But as the pace and scale of cyber threats
that we face expands, so must our response toolkit. We need
sustained investment to modernize and protect our most critical
Federal systems as well as State and local governments
suffering under budget constraints and increasingly aggressive
ransomware operators. Part of the solution is dedicated
preparedness grants for cybersecurity, which Secretary Mayorkas
has endorsed and Congress is considering.
Another part of the solution is the establishment of the
Cyber Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF). I want to thank the
Committee for introducing S. 1316, the Cyber Response and
Recovery Act. The establishment of a CRRF will ensure CISA has
sufficient resources and capacity to respond rapidly to
catastrophic cyber incidents.
But investment only goes so far. It is imperative that we
move to more secure and defensible architectures. We must
transition zero trust from a buzzword to the baseline standard
for network design and configuration. It will not be easy,
smooth, or cheap, but the cost of not doing so is simply too
high.
CISA's charge is clear: protect and defend the Federal
Government's networks through collaborative risk management. To
accomplish this objective, we continue to drive the collective
defense model for cybersecurity, apply the lessons learned from
these recent cyber incidents to improve our capabilities, and
raise the bar for long-term cybersecurity to be able to truly
defend today and secure tomorrow.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify on this
important subject, and I look forward to your questions.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Wales.
Our second witness today is Ryan Higgins, the Chief
Information Security Officer for the Department of Commerce. In
this role, Mr. Higgins provides leadership for the Department's
cybersecurity program, which includes establishing policies and
procedures for the Department and its bureaus in accordance
with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of
2014, implementing enterprise cybersecurity functions, and
coordinating incident response activities on behalf of the
Department. Prior to joining the Department in March, Mr.
Higgins held a variety of leadership roles in the Department of
Justice (DOJ), including as Assistant Director for
Administration at the United States Trustee Program (USTP) and
several roles in the Justice Management Division Office of the
Chief Information Officer (CIO). Mr. Higgins has also spent
several years in the private sector as a practitioner in the
areas of IT security policy and network security.
Welcome, Mr. Higgins. Please proceed with your opening
comments.
TESTIMONY OF RYAN A. HIGGINS,\1\ CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY
OFFICER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
Mr. Higgins. Good morning, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member
Portman, and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the
invitation to appear before you today to provide an update on
the Department of Commerce's incident response activities.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Higgins appear in the Appendix on
page 123.
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I serve as the Department's CISO and Deputy CIO within the
Office of the CIO. I joined the Department in March 2020 and
provide leadership for the Department's cybersecurity program,
which includes establishing policies and procedures for the
Department and its bureaus in accordance with FISMA,
implementing enterprise cybersecurity functions in accordance
with FISMA and coordinating incident response activities on
behalf of the Department.
As Mr. Wales testified at the Committee's previous hearing
on the SolarWinds attack, a cybersecurity campaign affecting
multiple Federal agencies, critical infrastructure providers,
and private sector organizations was identified in early
December 2020. Within Commerce, National Telecommunications and
Information Administration (NTIA) identified indications of a
potential systemic compromise related to this campaign and
immediately began engaging with the Department's Office of the
CIO to initiate incident response activities. As a result of
this engagement, the Department was one of the first Federal
agencies to identify potential systemic compromise in response
to SolarWinds, determined that this was a major incident, and
immediately initiated coordination with CISA to assist.
FISMA directs OMB to define the term ``major incident'' and
requires agencies to notify Congress in the event of one. As
defined by OMB, major incidents include those that are likely
to result in demonstrable harm to the national security
interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United
States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public
health and safety of the American people.
Based upon what the Department knew concerning the
potential systemic compromise, an initial review showed it met
the definition of a major cybersecurity incident. Within an
hour of making this determination, the Department notified CISA
and OMB. Subsequently, the Department, in accordance with
Presidential Policy Directive-41 (PPD-41), sent a notification
of a significant cybersecurity incident to the FBI, CISA, and
the ODNI to request coordinated support. As required by FISMA,
the Department notified Congress within 7 days and subsequently
provided more detailed information.
The Department actively participated in the Cyber Unified
Coordination Group stood up in response to the SolarWinds
incident, which supported information sharing and coordination
across the government for all affected agencies.
Along with the hands-on assistance with respect to the
identified compromise, CISA also released Emergency Directive
21-01, which provided guidance for the Department to further
investigate and determine the scope of exposure at the
Department's bureaus beyond NTIA. The Department completed all
required activities for the energy directive, including the
three supplementals. Department and bureau representatives also
regularly participated in CISA-hosted calls, which provided
updated information about developments related to the incident.
In addition to CISA, the Department received assistance
from the FBI and the Microsoft Detection and Response Team
(DART) to investigate, remediate and recover from the
SolarWinds incident. We have concluded our initial engagements
with each of these partners and received recommendations from
CISA and Microsoft to inform our immediate recovery activities.
Along with the remediation efforts in process by the Department
and NTIA, the longer-term recovery plan includes: adopting and
implementing zero trust for migrating to a modern security
architecture; conducting Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) 3.03
pilots for accelerating the adoption of cloud, mobile, and
other emerging technologies; upgrading security features in
existing solutions and services to maximize capabilities; and
transitioning to cloud-centric models and replacing legacy on-
premise infrastructure.
In closing, I want to emphasize that we remain in close
coordination with our Federal partners to ensure that we are
sharing relevant information through established channels and
continuously identifying opportunities to strengthen our
cybersecurity posture. While the immediate activities related
to SolarWinds have moved from incident response to longer-term
recovery, we must remain vigilant as the threat environment
continues to evolve and our adversaries learn from these
incidents just as we do.
Thank you again for the opportunity to appear before you
today, and I look forward to answering your questions.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Higgins, for your
testimony.
Our final witness today is Janet Vogel, Chief Information
Security Officer for the Department of Health and Human
Services. In this role, Ms. Vogel has initiated transformation
projects related to machine learning, authorization to operate,
and cybersecurity reporting standardization. Ms. Vogel
previously served as the Deputy Chief Information Officer and
Director for Operations for the Office of Information
Technology for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
(CMS). Ms. Vogel joined the HHS Office of the Secretary in
2018, with more than 25 years of experience. Her experience
includes implementing the Federal Shared System for human
resources (HR) management, known as ``HR Connect,'' at the U.S.
Treasury and directing information technology policy and
implementing the fee-for-service management of systems at the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
Welcome, Ms. Vogel. You are now recognized for your five
minute opening statement.
TESTIMONY OF JANET VOGEL,\1\ CHIEF INFORMATION SECURITY
OFFICER, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Ms. Vogel. Thank you. Good morning, Chairman Peters,
Ranking Member Portman, and Members of the Committee. Thank you
for the invitation to appear before you today to provide an
update on the Department of Health and Human Service's incident
response activities.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Vogel appears in the Appendix on
page 126.
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I serve as the Department's Chief Information Security
Officer in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, and I
have led the security program at HHS since 2018. My office
establishes policies and procedures for the operating divisions
and the Department. We also implement and operate enterprise
cybersecurity functions and coordinate incident response
activities on behalf of the Department.
As we know today, the SolarWinds event was an unprecedented
attack on the SolarWinds Corporation and its public and private
sector customers. Malicious actors accessed the corporation's
environment and introduced the malicious code. The code was
then spread to SolarWinds customers through regular software
updates. HHS' response to this threat is detailed in the
written testimony provided to the Committee. I will summarize
some of those actions here.
On the evening of December 13, 2020, I received a call from
a CISA colleague alerting me to malicious activity. We
immediately engaged all of the components of Health and Human
Services and joined the CISA-led call. Action was taken
immediately after that call to begin mitigation of any
potential impact of the malware. We implemented enterprise
security tools. We searched for the activity that would match
the attacker's indicators, tactics, and techniques. We notified
all operating divisions and began taking a coordinated action
against the versions of the malicious software. We took all of
those instances offline immediately and began analyzing the
results.
Soon after, we received Emergency Directive 21-01 from the
CISA, and we were able to begin implementing and responding
right away. The next day we were able to report out to CISA our
activities and how we have met the initial version 21-01
requirements.
Since that time, we also responded to any supplemental
guidance, and we utilized the tools provided by CISA to help
mitigate any of the potential impacts and also block all of the
network access.
During the investigation and remediation period, HHS
identified several lessons learned, and we tested our best
practices. Several of our practices align with new
cybersecurity frameworks such as zero trust. One example is
that network segmentation and other defense in-depth practices
can limit the degree of which a compromise in one system can
spread to other systems.
In summary, HHS will continue to take every necessary
precaution to address this and other incidents like it in the
future. We remain mindful that our adversaries are already
developing other cyber hacking approaches and capabilities.
With our partners such as CISA, the private sector, and other
Federal and private organizations, we will remain vigilant. We
are committed to addressing the unique and ever-changing
challenges in cybersecurity to ensure all Americans' safety,
security, and confidence in our digitally connected world.
Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Portman, Members of the
Committee, we appreciate the opportunity to testify today, and
I am happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ms. Vogel.
Mr. Wales, I know we are here today to focus on Federal
cybersecurity, but I think it is important to discuss the
attack that we have just recently seen on Colonial Pipeline,
one of the largest attacks on critical infrastructure in our
history.
Last month, Ranking Member Portman and I introduced the
Cyber Response and Recovery Act, which would give the Secretary
of Homeland Security the authority to declare a significant
incident and use Cyber Response and Recovery Fund after events
like this. I know you are familiar with the legislation that we
have introduced.
While I understand it is too soon to talk about this in
relation to the specific situation, we are still learning a lot
about that, and we will see the impact of that in the days and
weeks ahead. But if you could answer the question: How would
this new authority enable CISA to provide more assistance
during these types of incidents and whether they occur on
privately owned critical infrastructure or the Federal system?
What is your assessment?
Mr. Wales. Sure, sir, and, again, we think that this is an
absolutely instrumental advancement in the country's ability to
respond to significant catastrophic cyber incidents. We have
seen that our adversaries are increasingly focused on broad,
significant campaigns, campaigns that do not focus on any
individual sector. They are not limited to just the government.
In the face of those broad campaigns, we want to ensure that we
have the resources to surge our support, our incident response,
and our prevention activities to the scale that they are
needed, and, in particular, the kinds of entities that most
often come to CISA for assistance, State and local governments,
small private sector companies that do not have the resources
and organic skills to be able to respond to incidents of the
scale and severity that we have seen. A Cyber Response and
Recovery Fund will be essential in ensuring that we have those
resources, we can expand our capacity, and we can support our
ability to get ahead of catastrophic cyber incidents. So we are
eager to continue working with Congress on the establishment
and execution of such a fund.
Chairman Peters. I appreciate the support of our
legislation, and you talked about the additional resources from
the fund. Could you be a little more specific to give folks a
better appreciation as to how those funds would be used to help
in situations like we have seen?
Mr. Wales. Sure. I think there are a couple of different
ways in which we would potentially use those funds. First is to
ensure that we can expand and surge CISA's organic incident
response teams, bringing in additional, for example, contract
resources to build out our cyber defense teams to allow us to
go onsite and assist potential victims. It will be used to
deploy additional sensors and technologies at sites that we are
responding to. It can also be used to reimburse other agencies
for assistance, so there are times when we establish agreements
with the Department of Defense (DOD) to surge activities from
the cyber--surge resources from U.S. Cyber Command and others.
And right now we have to take that out of our existing
resources. We would have the CRRF in the future to be able to
reimburse those agencies for the assistance that they are
providing on behalf of CISA to support our partners or the
potential victims in the field.
Chairman Peters. Mr. Wales, SolarWinds was a critical
cybersecurity incident because of the sensitive information
that was accessed but also the widespread impact that it had
all across the Federal Government as well as private sectors.
FISMA, however, does not seem to account for this kind of
widespread intrusion.
From your perspective as the lead operational agency for
Federal cybersecurity, do you agree that we need to consider
the scope of an incident, how many victims are affected, for
example, when evaluating its severity?
Mr. Wales. Yes, and as a point of fact, we score incidents
ourselves using a scoring schema that was part of the National
Cyber Incident Response Plan (NCIRP), and one of the factors we
look at as part of that is the scale and scope of the incident.
Chairman Peters. When you issued your SolarWinds emergency
directive, you requested that every agency respond with details
of their compromise to help determine both the number and the
severity of which each of the different agencies were affected.
Is that a correct reading of the directive?
Mr. Wales. Correct.
Chairman Peters. Why was it so important for CISA to
understand the overall severity of the threat? If you could
explain that for the Committee, please.
Mr. Wales. Sure, and as I pointed out in my opening
remarks, one of the lines of effort of CISA's work in
partnership with the other UCG members like the FBI is
understanding the scope of the incident, because that is going
to help us ensure that we are providing support to the right
places; we understand the objective of the adversary. We could
look for potential compromises in places that it has not yet
been detected. And so it is instrumental in any of our
additional cybersecurity work to understand exactly what
happened?
Chairman Peters. So to Mr. Higgins and Ms. Vogel, clearly
the Departments vary significantly in when and how they declare
a major cyber incident and share information with Congress.
While I understand that early on you may not have known all of
the details of the intrusion, a notification that says,
``Something happened,'' without any additional details or
context, quite frankly, prevents Congress from conducting
effective oversight. The law governing this is FISMA, and while
agencies may be meeting the letter of the law, they certainly
are not meeting the intent of the law.
So my question to both of you: Do you believe that sending
a notification to Congress simply saying that an intrusion into
your agency's network occurred but not providing any details is
sufficient for effective oversight? Mr. Higgins.
Mr. Higgins. Chairman Peters, with regards to the
Department of Commerce, when we encountered the incident, we
took into consideration a few different things: the nature of
the compromise. We took into consideration the systems and
information involved. We also took into consideration the
stakeholders and customers impacted.
Given what we knew and, more importantly, what we did not
know, we felt it more than appropriate to notify OMB and CISA
and subsequently Congress of a major cybersecurity incident. It
is important to note that given the moment you are not going to
have all the information that you need but you are going to
have enough information to share that with CISA and others to
prevent any further spreading of malicious activity. So with
respect to Commerce, it is important that we are transparent
and up front with what we know and what we do not know as soon
as we can so that all bodies involved can make requisite
decisions and take the necessary action.
Chairman Peters. Yes, absolutely.
Ms. Vogel.
Ms. Vogel. Yes, thank you, Chairman Peters. When we
received notice and the details of an incident, we were able to
respond very quickly with an assessment of whether we had been
compromised and the impact of that. As we looked at the impact
against the criteria, we felt that we had not lost any data. We
had also firewalled everything appropriately, that there would
not be follow-up activity. We determined right away we did not
believe this was a major incident--certainly a very
sophisticated and complicated event, but we confirmed with CISA
and also our OMB desk officer our determination that we would
not declare a major incident at that time.
Again, if we had received more information, if we had
gotten other signs of activity, we would have revisited that
decision right away, and we would have conferred with the CISA,
who have details that they could share with us about what was
going on in other departments.
Chairman Peters. Very well. Ranking Member Portman, you are
recognized for your questions.
Senator Portman. Great. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I will say I am concerned that agencies just did not
report. Under FISMA it is pretty clear, when you look at the
definition, that a report would have been required, any
incident ``likely to result in demonstrable harm to the
national security interest, foreign relations, or economy'' or
a breach involving personally identifiable information (PII).
So maybe we need to tighten up at FISMA requirement, because
the CISA requirement and the OMB requirement is far more
specific. I appreciate the fact that Commerce did report to
Congress--thank you--and I am concerned that HHS did not.
Ms. Vogel, I understand that, you all looked at what the
impact was on HHS, but to me this was definitely a major
incident, and certainly it was in terms of the relationship
between the different agencies.
I would agree with what the Chairman at least implied in
his questioning, which is that at least, give us the
opportunity to get notified of these so that we can do our
proper oversight and be sure that, we are putting together
legislation that makes sense to respond to these attacks.
With regard to Colonial Pipeline, I know today's focus is
about Federal cybersecurity attacks, but this Colonial Pipeline
one, as I said earlier, is probably the biggest attack ever on
American infrastructure, certainly the biggest one that we know
of. Colonial supplies almost half of the oil to the east coast.
The systems remain offline today as we talk. They have made
some progress, I understand, opening up some lines, but not all
the way to the east coast. My hope is by the end of this week,
that will be improved. But this is a historic example of how
these cyber attacks can have real, demonstrable impacts on our
economy and our national security. Ask the people who are in
east coast States about what they are paying for gasoline today
at the pump, and they will tell you it has impact.
There are a variety of tools and guidance to combat
ransomware at CISA, Mr. Wales, but as we have seen here, we are
not effectively combating ransomware. Let me ask you a couple
questions. Did Colonial contact you?
Mr. Wales. They did not contact CISA directly.
Senator Portman. So they did not contact CISA. Did CISA
contact Colonial?
Mr. Wales. We were brought in by the FBI after they were
notified about the incident.
Senator Portman. OK. Would it have been helpful to you if
Colonial had contacted you immediately to provide information
so you could respond more effectively?
Mr. Wales. So we received information fairly quickly in
concert with the FBI. I think right now we are waiting for
additional technical information on exactly what happened at
Colonial so that we can use that information to potentially
protect other potential victims down the road.
Senator Portman. So you still do not have the technical
information you need to be able to be responsive and to provide
support to critical infrastructure. Is that what you are
saying?
Mr. Wales. Yes, but that is not surprising given that, they
have only been working on the incident response since over the
weekend and it is fairly early. We have had a historically good
relationship with both Colonial as well as the cybersecurity
firms that are working on their behalf. We do expect
information to come from that, and when we have it, we will use
it to help improve cybersecurity more broadly.
Senator Portman. If the FBI had not brought you in, would
Colonial, do you think, have contacted you to ask for your
assistance?
Mr. Wales. No.
Senator Portman. Do you think that is a problem?
Mr. Wales. I think that there is benefit when CISA is
brought in quickly, because the information that we glean, we
work to share it in a broader fashion to protect other critical
infrastructure.
Senator Portman. Right. I think that is the point, that,
one, you could have helped Colonial; but, two, having that
technical information enables you to help other critical
infrastructure. If there is ransomware focused on Colonial,
there is likely to be ransomware focused on other critical
infrastructure as well. Isn't that true?
Mr. Wales. That is true.
Senator Portman. We appreciate your testimony today about
the need for more funding, for preparedness funding, for CISA
funding, the need to transform some of our systems and the cost
of that. But it seems to me we also have to worry about these
attacks, whether they are direct cyber attacks in the Federal
Government or whether they are attacks in the private sector,
whether they are ransomware attacks, being communicated to CISA
in that, you have the expertise. We have passed a lot of
funding already and a lot of bipartisan legislation to help you
all have the tools that you need. It seems to me we have to be
sure that communication flow is happening.
By the way, just a general question, and, I look forward to
a second round when we can get into more of this. But my sense
is that we have a number of vulnerabilities at the Federal
level. One is the systems themselves. In other words, the
software, in particular, some of the hardware is not updated.
Is that accurate?
Mr. Wales. There are legacy systems in the Federal
Government that require modernization, absolutely.
Senator Portman. Is that where you would focus most of the
funding immediately? What would be your top target? Because,
also, we have a lot of discussion on this Committee about
personnel and ensuring we have the best and the brightest with
the Federal Government to be able to protect our personal
information and national security. We also know that, there is
concern about practices; in other words, even with the best
personnel and with the best infrastructure, software and
hardware, if you are not following the right practices, the so-
called cyber hygiene to be able to protect your systems, to be
able to provide the appropriate encryption and so on, that it
is difficult to defend against these attacks. How would you
prioritize those and where would you prioritize the funding?
Mr. Wales. Yes, I do not think you can prioritize among
those three. Those are areas that, as you are deploying new
technology, those all need to advance in parallel. You need to
ensure that as you put in place new systems, you have the
people that are actually capable of utilizing them to improve
your security. You need to have people who have the ability to
configure them in the right way. We see this a lot,
particularly with the move to the cloud. In particular at the
State and local level, they will deploy on the cloud, but they
will misconfigure their cloud environment and make it open and
accessible to potential malicious actors. And so you want to
ensure that your technology, your people, and your processes
are being modernized together, because if any one of those lags
behind, you are going to introduce weaknesses into your overall
information security program.
Senator Portman. That is the idea in having CISA have more
responsibility and more funding and the expertise, and so we
need to continue to work on that. But, again, we have done a
lot to provide the tools, and now the question is how do you
bring those three elements and others together. We have to do
it yesterday because these attacks continue.
Mr. Wales. But, sir, I would also add that it is not just
CISA, because ultimately the agencies are the ones that are
deploying technology on their environment to support the
operational needs of their mission. As they do so, they need to
do it with security in mind. They need to build that kind of
security and resilience in. They need to build in those kind of
zero trust principles to ensure that their systems are
protected. They need to ensure that they have the right people
and processes in place. We can assist them. We provide best
practices. In some cases, we provide technology. But, overall,
managing that information security program at an agency is
essential, and I think that is why we need to ensure that the
CISOs like those joining me today are kind of empowered and
resourced to be able to support the needs and the security of
their agency.
Senator Portman. Empowered and resourced and held
accountable for what happens at those agencies, including the
reporting we talked about earlier. Correct?
Mr. Wales. Yes.
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Portman, and
accountability is critically important. I could not agree more.
Senator Carper, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Can you hear me?
Chairman Peters. I hear you fine, Senator.
Senator Carper. All right. Let me start off by saying to
Director Wales, thank you for serving as our Acting Director in
this capacity for a number of months. I just want to thank you
for that and for your continued service. I understand someone
else has been nominated to succeed you, but you will continue
in this post for a while, and we thank you for that.
In your testimony you describe how CISA has the unique
ability to gather and to analyze information from the Federal
civilian networks, with data received from the intelligence
community (IC), from the private sector, and State, local,
tribal, and territorial (SLTT) partners. Could you take a
moment, please, and explain how CISA's unique role and its
ability to access information across various sectors has helped
the agency respond to the SolarWinds attack?
Mr. Wales. Sure, thank you, Senator. I appreciate the kind
words, and your question I think is important, and it gets into
a bit of the exchange that I was having with Senator Portman.
CISA's unique responsibility is to help the broad community
improve their cybersecurity. We are the only Federal agency
charged with getting information out to support everyone's
cybersecurity and resilience. But for us to do that, we need to
be fed the right information from all of our partners. That
means from the intelligence community, getting an understanding
of where the adversaries are focusing, the tactics and
techniques that they are using. It means gaining access from
our private sector colleagues and our State and local
governments about what they are seeing on their networks. The
earlier we have at information and the more information we are
able to bring together, the better picture that we can provide
about what is happening, what vulnerabilities our adversaries
are attempting to exploit, what techniques that they are using,
what signatures we can load into the defensive systems, what
new tools we need to deploy. But that all requires to be fed
and that information coming together in one place, and I think
that is CISA's focus, enhancing our ability to take that
information in, to analyze it and get it out, because
ultimately we have that responsibility of helping to improve
the cybersecurity baseline across the country, across sectors,
across the public and private divide, and make our country more
secure. I think we work hard every day to build that collective
defense model, but it does require support. It does require
collaboration from our industry and from our State and local
governments. I think we have worked hard over the past several
years to build trust that enables that to happen, but we still
have a lot of work ahead of us.
Senator Carper. All right. Thank you for that response.
I have a follow-up for Mr. Higgins and also for Ms. Vogel.
Thank you both again for joining us today and for your
continued service. I frequently say that the two most important
ingredients to a healthy democracy are the same two ingredients
that are helpful for a healthy marriage, and they are
collaboration and communication. I believe that CISA's work to
protect and defend our Federal Government networks and to help
agencies respond to cyber incidents requires the same thing--
collaboration and communication.
Mr. Higgins and Ms. Vogel, could each of you take a moment
to describe how CISA helps your respective agencies respond to
and protect against the SolarWinds attack? Go right ahead. Mr.
Higgins, you go first.
Mr. Higgins. Certainly, Senator. With regards to the
support that we receive from CISA, they were instrumental in
helping us with regards to incident report, threat hunting,
analysis of logs, analysis of forensic images as well, but also
information sharing. I think throughout the course of the
engagement CISA was a partner the whole way. They augmented our
current capabilities and provided us with very informative
lessons learned that we can use to fortify our cybersecurity
defenses moving forward that feed into our long-term objectives
in terms of our strategies, our policies, our procedures. We
are very fortunate and appreciative of the support that we do
receive from CISA.
Senator Carper. Thanks for that.
Ms. Vogel, could you describe for us how CISA helped your
agency respond to and protect against the SolarWinds attack.
Ms. Vogel. Certainly, and thank you for your words. We were
able to share information with CISA and our private sector
partners, our focus being on health and human services for the
country. We are in multiple organizations that share
information on cybersecurity, especially in the health care
sector. CISA is able to give us tools and information that they
can gather from other sectors that might apply in our
environment. Not every instance is the same, and our business
within HHS is much varied over many different types of
business. CISA has provided information and collaboration
opportunities for us that have been able to let us engage with
other departments on specific needs and in specific areas. So
definitely they have facilitated collaboration and
communication for us.
Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks for that.
A brief follow-up question, the same question for each of
you. How can we improve interagency communication and
collaboration between CISA and other government agencies not
only after cyber incidents but before one occurs? Ms. Vogel,
would you go first?
Ms. Vogel. Certainly. Currently we interact with CISA
colleagues on a regular basis. I meet with my colleagues. We
also have multiple work groups, and in those work groups they
look at the technical environment at the time and what to do.
They work side by side when solving problems or doing research.
We have more opportunities for communication and
collaboration as new events develop. We are also working on
resiliency to be prepared to be able to mitigate any potential
threats that come.
So in our opportunities to engage with CISA, we feel that
there is an extremely beneficial back-and-forth that we work
with them on a daily basis.
Senator Carper. Mr. Higgins, briefly respond to the same
question, please.
Mr. Higgins. Yes, Senator. I think collaborating and
communicating not only when something goes wrong but all the
time, I think it has to be an ongoing endeavor. With regards to
the other item, I would say making sure that CISA has the
requisite visibility within your environment so that they can
take the requisite actions as opposed to waiting for a data
call or something to that effect. I think there is a lot of
technology that we can employ, implement within our environment
to ensure that CISA has visibility so that when something does
happen, it lessens the timeframe by which case they can act and
we can communicate with them.
Senator Carper. All right. My thanks to both of you. Thank
you to our Director as well.
Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Carper.
Senator Johnson, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON
Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Picking up a little bit with what Senator Carper was
talking about, the cooperation and collaboration between the
agencies, I think it is one of the reasons we helped facilitate
the passage and now hopefully the appointment of a National
Cyber Director so that we have somebody in charge, somebody who
can be held accountable, and somebody who can enforce that
collaboration. i am looking forward to meeting with the nominee
here shortly, and hopefully we can get that individual
confirmed and on the job and being held accountable.
Mr. Wales, there is not a problem, since I have been here,
10, going on 11 years, that the solution is not always more
funding. CISA's budget is around $2 billion a year. Correct?
Mr. Wales. Correct.
Senator Johnson. DHS total, about 2.6. The Federal
Government in total for 2021 will spend almost $19 billion on
cybersecurity. In the real world, that is a lot of money. Have
you done kind of soup-to-nuts, zero-based budgeting to
determine how you are already spending the $2 billion? Let us
face it, whether it is the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
hack, the SolarWinds, it just keeps happening. Again, this is
not an easy issue. I understand that. But, unfortunately, I
have been in this role now for many years and listened to kind
of the same bureaucratic explanations, the same, collaboration,
information sharing, which I think is all important, but these
problems are still happening. Have you really done a deep dive
in terms of what CISA does and what these agencies are spending
all this $19 billion on?
Mr. Wales. Sure, so I can certainly talk within CISA. We
have looked hard at our budget to make tradeoff decisions about
where we need to invest our resources to be smart about
ensuring that we are applying resources in the areas that need
it most. I think that the challenge that we face across the
entire U.S. Government is twofold:
First is that we are in a bit of a technology and
cybersecurity deficit, that we have not invested to the degree
necessary over time, particularly in modernizing legacy systems
that have vulnerabilities----
Senator Johnson. Should we maybe, the $1.9 billion COVID
relief package--maybe put some of that $1.9 trillion toward
this? Or talking about infrastructure, should we maybe--if we
are going to spend money on infrastructure, spend it on that? I
want some short answers here because I have a lot of questions.
Mr. Wales. Sure. I will say that we believe that any
infrastructure development should have cybersecurity and
resilience built in up front. I will leave it to you about how
best to achieve those goals. But I just want to make one really
fast point, which is the challenge in cyber is that the threats
and the technology are advancing substantially, so technology
that we deployed 15 years ago needs substantial modernization
today to ensure that it keeps pace with the threats that we are
now facing.
Senator Johnson. The Federal Government has a hard time
keeping pace. Let me just ask you, have you connected the dots
or are you trying to connect the dots or looking to see if they
are connected between the SolarWinds hack and what happened
with Colonial Pipeline? The reason I ask this is my concern
about what happened with Colonial Pipeline is it is just a shot
across the bow. These hacks and what was achieved with
SolarWinds, it is gathering information to be used at some
point in time. Are we looking seriously in terms of how they
may use that information and whether or not this might have
been connected to the Colonial Pipeline?
Mr. Wales. We are looking hard at the information that the
adversary gleaned from SolarWinds, looking at reflections and
intelligence, and the FBI is actively investigating the
Colonial Pipeline incident. What I can say is they have
positively attributed this incident to the DarkSide ransomware
crew, which is a criminal enterprise, and it is not surprising
that a criminal enterprise is going after increasingly
important targets for ransomware operations. We have seen this
over the past 2 years. They are going after bigger players to
get bigger ransoms. Ransoms last year went up to around
$300,000 for small ones and millions of dollars for the big
ones. So it is not----
Senator Johnson. Right. We understand that is a problem.
Again, we are trying to figure out how to prevent it.
I want to shift a little bit in terms of the vulnerable of
our electrical grid because that is really to a certain extent
what the Colonial Pipeline hack is about. We saw the Texas
power outage. As we move toward the Internet of Things (IoT),
as we become more and more connected, we become way more
vulnerable. As we move toward this green energy utopia, I am
highly concerned that we are making our electrical grid even
more vulnerable to these types of attacks. Again, that is why I
am saying this is just a shot across the bow. I do not think we
have even come close to addressing the vulnerability of our
grid. Again, infrastructure package, I am not hearing anybody
talk about purchasing in advance these large power transformers
that could be wiped out in an electromagnetic pulse (EMP),
geomagnetic disturbance (GMD), or a cyber attack, and they are
irreplaceable, basically, in a short period of time. We are
just not thinking through how incredibly vulnerable we are. We
are shutting down nuclear energy plants. The fact that we are
allowing homeowners to tie into the grid, to sell back energy
from their solar panels, address how unbelievably vulnerable we
truly are in our electrical grid and how a move toward green
energy is probably making us even more vulnerable. Is that
something CISA is really looking at? Because you are way more
than cybersecurity. You are about infrastructure security.
Mr. Wales. Sure, and we are working very closely with the
Energy Department as well as the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA), which is responsible for security of
pipelines, particularly focused on natural gas pipelines that
are feeding electric power-generating units across the country.
We have worked hard to do assessments on pipelines,
particularly looking at their Supervisory Control and Data
Acquisition (SCADA) systems, their industrial control systems,
the operational networks that manage and run these complex
systems, to provide as much as we can in terms of advice,
recommendations for improving the network architectures, making
improvements to their baseline level of cybersecurity, how they
can improve network segmentation to avoid disruptions on
business systems impacting operational systems. So that has
been a significant focus of CISA's work over the past year.
Senator Johnson. Again, would you agree we are becoming
more vulnerable?
Mr. Wales. I would say----
Senator Johnson. Rather than, creating island grids, we are
becoming more and more connected and leaving us even more and
more vulnerable. Isn't that correct?
Mr. Wales. What I would say is that because of the
deployment of technology, we are becoming more susceptible to
cybersecurity risk in more parts of our infrastructure, more
parts of our manufacturing, more parts of our health care, and
we need to work hard to ensure that we are providing security
around those new systems.
Senator Johnson. Thanks for that answer.
Mr. Chairman, I would like certainly this Committee and I
would like this administration to really focus on the
vulnerable, because we are not. We are not making the
investments, for example, in those large power transformers.
They are irreplaceable basically in the short term. We are just
not recognizing how vulnerable we are.
Thank you.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Johnson.
Senator Hassan, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN
Senator Hassan. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and Ranking
Member Portman, for holding this hearing. Thank you to our
witnesses today for being here on this important national
security issue and for your service.
I want to start with a question to Ms. Vogel and Mr.
Higgins. Our other witness, Mr. Wales, has previously testified
that the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program
will continue to be an integral part of securing the Federal
Government's network, including through the addition of more
capabilities such as endpoint detection and response tools.
I agree with Mr. Wales, which is why Senator Cornyn and I
introduced a bill last Congress to codify CDM. But I am also
interested to hear about CDM from the perspective of those
agencies implementing it.
Ms. Vogel and Mr. Higgins, how does CDM factor into the
plans for improving your agencies' cybersecurity? What
challenges, if any, have you encountered in implementing CDM?
Ms. Vogel, we can start with you.
Ms. Vogel. Thank you, and thank you for your comments. CDM
has been quite a challenge, and that is because it is a huge
effort. It is looking into all the complexities of our multiple
operating divisions within HHS. In doing so, we encounter
different scenarios, different status of modernization, and
each of those areas has to be tailored to a specific
requirement, and it means we have to change software, hardware,
or whatever we do.
It is a very complex activity. We have found, though, that
what is provided really helps us as a Department, because as we
have implemented the different aspects of CDM, we are getting
more information more timely, and that means we can respond to
anything that we see going on on our network or anywhere else.
We see that faster. We can respond faster. That helps mitigate
any of the potential damage.
Senator Hassan. Thank you.
Ms. Vogel. So we are very encouraged by the success of CDM
so far, and we are looking forward to the expansion to help us
manage the cybersecurity risks in HHS.
Senator Hassan. Thank you.
Mr. Higgins.
Mr. Higgins. Yes, Senator, so CDM plays an integral role
within the Department of Commerce in terms of fortifying our
cybersecurity posture. We as well are working very closely with
CISA to roll out the various phases.
With regards to challenges, you are always going to have
things like integration, duplication, ensuring that you are not
purchasing things for the sake of purchasing, but purchasing
those things that are going to give you greater security and
making sure that, as we purchase things, we can decommission
other things to achieve cost savings. So suffice it to say CDM
has been a huge success for us. We have a lot of work to do.
The challenges may persist, but we look very much forward to
continuing CDM implementation throughout the Department.
Senator Hassan. Thank you. And just quickly for each of
you, would it be helpful to your agencies if additional
capabilities were made available such as endpoint detection and
response tools? Mr. Higgins.
Mr. Higgins. Absolutely, Senator.
Senator Hassan. Ms. Vogel.
Ms. Vogel. Yes.
Senator Hassan. Thank you.
To Mr. Wales, the Department of Homeland Security recently
launched its cybersecurity workforce sprint with the goal of
hiring 200 cybersecurity professionals by July, including 100
at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, your
agency. We all recognize that this is a really short timeframe,
so how are DHS and CISA going to accomplish this goal?
Mr. Wales. Sure, thank you, Senator, and I think going to
Senator Portman's question earlier, the people are
instrumental. They are critical to all the things that we do in
CISA to achieve our goals, whether it is program management of
complex programs like CDM or technical expertise that we are
providing to agencies.
We are using a number of different avenues to recruit our
cybersecurity workforce. Part of that includes using new
programs that the Department is rolling out, for example, an
honors program focused on new graduates to bring in new
professionals into the workforce. Part of it is using our
existing array of authorities. We are doing a lot of recruiting
events, particularly at minority-serving institutions, during
this period. Our goal is to begin to fill our ranks more
quickly.
I will say we have made a lot of progress. We have hired
more people in the first six months of 2021 than we have in the
previous two years, but we have a lot more work to do. We still
have vacancies to fill, and we are going to use as many tools
as we can to fill them.
Senator Hassan. Thank you. Will DHS use the special hiring
authorities for cybersecurity positions Congress granted it in
2014, which has turned into the Cyber Talent Management System
(CTMS)? When do you expect it to be operational if you are
going to use that?
Mr. Wales. So right now the Department is indicating that
they believe it will be fully up and running in the fall, and
as soon as it is up and running, we are ready to begin using it
to hire folks. We have been working to identify the types of
positions that we think are best filled using the Cyber Talent
Management System approach. We have worked hard with the
Department to build out the testing around the specific
positions, and so we are ready to use it as soon as the program
is live.
Senator Hassan. Why has it taken so long to get there? This
was authority granted in 2014.
Mr. Wales. Sure. I am not best positioned to talk about the
length of time, this was a program that was managed by the
Department's Chief Human Capital Officer (CHCO). However, I
will say in order for us to do it, we have to roll out a fairly
significant new human capital system, completely doing away
with the existing general schedule that we have used since the
1920s or 1940s. It has required a large-scale rulemaking effort
that is finishing up now. It has taken longer than I think
anyone wanted, but it appears that we are on the cusp of
getting the program live, and we are ready to use it when it
is.
Senator Hassan. OK. Then I just wanted to follow up. You
mentioned that you were also focused in your recruiting on
minority institutions that serve minority students. Is CISA
also considering creating cyber apprenticeships that will allow
people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to get trained up
without the up-front education and credentialing costs
typically needed for cybersecurity positions?
Mr. Wales. I am not aware of a specific apprenticeship
program that we have, but let me talk to the staff and see.
There may be some things under development in our education and
training team.
Senator Hassan. Yes, one of the things--and I will finish
with this and follow up with more questions on the record. But
one of the things that I think is really important is to
understand that sometimes we have job descriptions and
requirements that are pretty outdated and rigid. When you think
about the kind of apprenticeship training we could do or
credentialing that we could do in a much more pathway-focused
manner, it could really be a big boon here. I would look
forward to discussing this with you further.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hassan.
I need to step out momentarily to ask questions at the
Armed Services Committee hearing that is going on now, so I
will pass the gavel to Ranking Member Portman. But before I
step out, Senator Lankford, you are recognized for your
questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD
Senator Lankford. Thank you, Chairman.
Mr. Wales, let me walk through a little bit of a timeline.
I have a broader question. It was December 8th of last year
that FireEye notifies everyone, hey, there is a problem. We
have detected what we consider a foreign actor somewhere that
is ingrained in our system. A few days later, on December 13th,
FireEye announced that it was compromised through SolarWinds
through the Orion platform, and then it starts this chain of
looking at who has SolarWinds, who has used the Orion platform,
what does that look like, and it suddenly gets announced a lot
of Federal entities have that, a lot of private entities have
that, and it chains down from there.
My question is: Had FireEye not found this December 8th,
would it still be operational today?
Mr. Wales. I do not know that we are capable of answering
that question fully. There may be other ways in which either
the public or the private sector could have identified that
activity. But I have said before that our private sector
cybersecurity capability in this country is a true asset, one
that helps the overall security of our country every day, and
we are lucky to have firms like FireEye and the other
cybersecurity firms out there who are looking for
vulnerabilities, looking for potential compromises, making the
government aware to ensure that we can get ahead of it.
I will just add one change to your timeline, which is
FireEye notified us of potential compromises earlier than
December 8th so that we could begin to understand what
happened, begin to look at our own networks, and we are really
appreciative of the partnership that we have with FireEye and
other players.
Senator Lankford. The challenge is the vulnerability here
as we walk through this, because had FireEye not found this and
said this is in our system, we have experienced an attack on
it, and then started trying to figure out where it came from
and realizing that it could be in a lot of other places that
they had it, it was in other places as well. The challenge that
we have is: How do we actually get onto this earlier and what
systems do we have in place? I understand zero day attacks and
that there are some things that are entirely novel. I get that,
as this was through the process. But when I go through your
testimony earlier and what your written testimony is, there is
a lot of detail about the response, and it seems to be very
detailed, that CISA's working response to this campaign has
four lines of effort: scoping, sharing the information,
detection techniques, short-term remediation, long-term
strategic recovery. You are very focused on what happens after
the fact. My question is: Are we that focused on before, on
detection? Walk me through the process that CISA has in place
in working with contractors and with government entities to be
able to help determine things in advance? I know they are
there. Walk me through those.
Mr. Wales. Sure. I think that there are approaches that we
are taking now, and then there are additional ways in which we
want to improve our ability to detect compromises earlier.
Right now the Federal Government, as you know, deploys
technology on the perimeter of the Federal enterprise, looking
for signatures of known malicious activity. When we get those,
we then work with the agency where that incident is being
targeted, to look inside of their systems, what are they
seeing, because they have deeper insight in terms of what is
happening on their individual networks.
In the future, as I have talked about previously, we need
to move deeper into networks, so an event like SolarWinds you
are never going to detect at the perimeter, you are never going
to detect at the edge.
Senator Lankford. Right.
Mr. Wales. You need to be looking on individual hosts, on
individual servers and work stations for when those start to
behave in anomalous fashions. Should your SolarWinds device all
of a sudden start talking on an encrypted channel with the
server outside of your network that it has never spoken to
before and probably should not, that could get alerted more
quickly. As Senator Hassan mentioned, the deployment of things
like endpoint detection and response tools on those critical
devices inside of networks will give both the agencies and CISA
deeper insight into what is happening there and to be able to
alert and cue us more quickly to incidents like this.
Again, there is no silver bullet, but we believe that
additional layers of visibility, additional improvements in
network segmentation, additional improvements in how networks
are architected and configured continues to drive adversaries
to more complicated and sophisticated attacks, reduces the
likelihood that they are successful, and increases the
likelihood that we will detect them more quickly.
Senator Lankford. Which agencies are leading in that effort
right now? Because, obviously, any agency could already do
that.
Mr. Wales. Sure, and most agencies have begun to deploy
things like endpoint detection tools on their network. What we
are using is the additional money provided through the American
Rescue Plan Act to really expand that more quickly to more
agencies. Again, partly this is a funding issue, and then
partly this is how do you take that information that is coming
from these new tools and sensors, and how do you integrate it
into improved visibility and action inside of agencies and with
CISA? And so that is the work that we are undertaking today.
Senator Lankford. So individual contractors and
certification of those contractors, of what they have to
achieve and then accountability for those contractors when they
fail to achieve those.
Mr. Wales. Yes, so there is a lot of work they need to do
in the supply chain realm. The government is actively working
on a cyber Executive Order (EO) that will begin to address some
of that. But we know that the improvements in the supply chain,
particularly for Federal agencies' software, is critical, and
we think it will have tangible benefits for the private sector
as companies who sell to the Federal Government make systemic
improvements that will benefit everyone.
Senator Lankford. Right. Six years ago, we were in a
conversation at a hearing just like this where many Federal
agencies were using virus protection programs and it was
discovered that all of their data is routing through Russia.
And this room was a little stunned by the whole process to be
realized that we did not verify that, that no one was really
checking those outside contractors, and that many agencies were
using materials like that.
So I guess my question is: Now, six years ago, as we
continue to make progress this and it has been chipping away
for several years, at what point do we get to the balance that
we know we are verifying what Federal computers are actually
using and the providers that are actually doing that and what
they are doing with that data? Then also not making this so
incredibly difficult that we only have one or two primes that
are out there and expose ourselves to having very few resources
that are out there and very little innovation? You have to
strike a difficult balance where we actually are doing
oversight, but not driving people out of the market.
Mr. Wales. Yes, and there has been significant improvement
in both agencies and across the government looking at supply
chain risk management in a more thorough way, and Congress has
also provided a number of tools for us like the Federal
Acquisition Security Council where DHS, DOD, and the ODNI, who
are looking at it and assessing the potential risk posed by
vendors for the Federal Government, either on the civilian
side, the intelligence side, or the defense side, can make
decisions and promulgate guidance for the rest of the agencies
to remove high-risk software or hardware from their networks.
That work is actually just getting started now, but provides us
a real mechanism and a framework to actually rid our networks
of anything that we think is high risk.
CISA has obviously taken action in the past, for example,
removing Kaspersky software across the civilian Executive
Branch when we believed that the risk posed by using that
software was too high. So we will take action in the interim,
but we now have a more dedicated process to examine the exact
issue that you are raising and systematically address it across
the entire U.S. Government.
Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you.
Senator Portman. [presiding]. Thank you, Senator Lankford.
Senator Rosen.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROSEN
Senator Rosen. Thank you, Senator Portman, of course, and
Chairman Peters, for holding this very important hearing. I
really appreciate the witnesses for your work in this area.
I would like to move right onto our cyber workforce
shortage because GAO has identified the consistent shortage of
cybersecurity personnel at Federal agencies as high risk to our
national security. So recent unprecedented cyber attacks, of
course, like SolarWinds, the Colonial Pipeline breaches, they
really demonstrate the urgency of equipping the U.S. Government
with the cyber challenge that we need to prevent and respond to
these attacks.
So to address this gap, last year I co-led Senator Wicker's
PACT Act as bipartisan legislation that was included in last
year's NDAA that increases resources and pathways for an
expanded cyber workforce. I also recently introduced bipartisan
legislation with Senator Blackburn to establish a Civilian
Cybersecurity Reserve at both DHS and DOD.
Mr. Wales, how can CISA utilize preexisting links between
the private sector and the Federal Government to mobilize a
cybersecurity surge capacity at our times of greatest need?
Mr. Wales. Sure, Senator. It is an important question and I
think one that was in some respects the basis for our strong
support for the Cyber Response and Recovery Fund concept. I
know that it is being considered as part of 1316, but for us it
is really about how do we ensure we have the right resources,
and part of the way in which we would obviously use those
resources is calling upon the significant private sector
capacity we have in the country to support us when we have
incidents that are significant and when our capabilities are
being stretched to the limit. We are lucky we have not actually
gotten to that point yet, but we know that with our adversaries
growing more aggressive, it is only a matter of time before a
catastrophic cyber incident really requires us to expand our
capabilities beyond those that we have onboard. I think we are
eager to work with Congress on additional ideas that you might
have about how to strengthen the additional tools and
capabilities that might be brought to bear like your concepts
related to a reserve contingent. But we want to utilize every
available mechanism, whether it is to hire people, whether it
is to have surge capacity, or whether it is to have a reserve.
So we are looking forward to continuing to work with you on
that.
Senator Rosen. Thank you. I would actually like to move
onto something kind of similar, because the SolarWinds attack
to me is especially disconcerting because the techniques used
were novel. They had never been seen before. So can you talk,
of course, in this setting a little bit about the status of
your analysis on the specific techniques that were novel used
in the attack and how that information is being identified to
help us do threat hunting, identify new vulnerabilities? Where
are we with understanding this new novel threat assessment and
trying to plug any gaps there?
Mr. Wales. Sure, and I think the idea is in many cases it
was a series of kind of small novel techniques that, when
coupled together, allowed them to execute an extremely
sophisticated attack. I think I would divide it into a couple
of areas. The first, and this was part of my discussion with
Senator Lankford, is: How do we ensure confidence in the supply
chain, particularly of software that is provided to the Federal
Government? There are a number of things that we are doing to
help improve the work that the Federal Government has to ensure
the security of software that is developed for us, pushing our
contractors to use more defensible, secure software development
processes.
Inside the government, it makes a huge difference about our
understanding of how critical systems are configured, the ports
and protocols that are used, so CISA is looking at kind of the
full array of our authorities, including resources granted
under the American Rescue Plan Act to allow us to deploy
technology to Federal agencies. We are looking at, in addition,
how do we use our binding operational directive authority to
focus agencies on closing gaps in their security and
configuration architecture. Finally, I think one of the real
lessons out of SolarWinds was the exploitation of cloud
environments, particularly Microsoft Office 365 cloud
environments for Federal agencies and the challenges with
visibility and logging that Federal agencies and CISA had for
what was happening inside of these cloud environments. So part
of our additional resources under the American Rescue Plan Act
is standing up a secure, threat-hardened cloud environment and
to pilot that out and them promulgate the reference
architecture across the Federal Government to help improve the
security of cloud environments for all of our Federal partners.
And so there is a lot of work based upon the lessons that
we have learned from SolarWinds and building that into our
programmatic structure, whether it is technology, whether it is
processes, whether it is directives, to ensure that we are
using every capability we have to improve our security.
Senator Rosen. Thank you. I would like to move on quickly
to another important area: hospital cybersecurity. We have
small rural hospitals all over this country. They are
understaffed medically. They are understaffed in the technology
area. They may not have all the resources, and so they are
high-value targets for some of these hackers. I guess we only
have about a minute left, so to both of you, do you think it
might be helpful to directly embed CISA cybersecurity advisers
into HHS regional offices to help some of our rural hospitals,
our smaller health centers, so they do not become victims, and
just have a collaborative boots-on-the-ground kind of approach?
We will start with Ms. Vogel, please.
Ms. Vogel. Yes, we are looking at how to reinforce the
capabilities that we have in our regional offices. Each of the
operating divisions in HHS brings their perspective to our
regional office for coordination.
Now, outreach and education is critical, and we support
that by putting out cybersecurity documentation alerts,
awareness packages on a regular basis. Last year alone, we sent
out to the public health sector over 97 documents that help
them in a situation of cybersecurity vulnerability. So we are
trying to educate them, and other assistance would really make
a difference.
Senator Rosen. Thank you. I will take my other questions
for the record, but I think this is an area where some better
collaboration can really help our most vulnerable communities,
particularly in the health care space.
Thank you.
Senator Portman. Senator Rosen, thank you very much for
your questions.
I am not sure who we have next. I think Senator Ossoff and
Senator Hawley might be online. Are you there?
[No response.]
OK. In the absence of Senator Ossoff or Senator Hawley, is
Senator Romney online by chance?
[No response.]
OK. We are going to go the second round then, and I will
start off. My first question has to do with a letter that
Chairman Peters and I sent to CISA back on April 5th. Mr.
Wales, I know you are aware of this letter, and we asked that
by April 20th we have a response. It is important that we have
the best information possible to be able to deal with two
things. One is the reauthorization of some of your programs
that is occurring next year. We want to be smart about that and
be sure that as we are reauthorizing things like the EINSTEIN
program, it is done properly. But, second, we are also working
on legislation, as I said earlier, to ensure that we can
respond to immediate threats and strengthen your abilities,
frankly.
We are concerned that we have not had a response yet except
for a few documents, all of which had previously been provided,
I am told, to this Committee and to the Congress. Will you
commit to providing a complete response to the letter this
morning?
Mr. Wales. Yes, we will respond. I know that we are in
active discussions with your staff and that actually a briefing
has been set for next week with the Department, who obviously
has responsibility for DHS systems, including some that support
CISA, and CISA will provide to the Committee next week that get
into some of the more details of some of the questions that
were asked as part of the letter. But we are actively working
this to ensure we provide as complete a response as possible.
Senator Portman. Can you give us a timeframe?
Mr. Wales. I cannot sitting here right now, but we are
working with your staff to provide as much detail as possible
as quickly as possible.
Senator Portman. Let us suggest a timeframe here this
morning that is appropriate. Two weeks?
Mr. Wales. We will work in two weeks to provide as much
information as we can. Again, my one concern is CISA does not
have all of the information, particularly questions related
to----
Senator Portman. If there is something we have asked that
is inappropriate, let us know. My sense is what we have asked
is relevant and appropriate to your reauthorization, and,
frankly, coming up with legislation that is more helpful in
responding to some of the attacks we talked about today.
Mr. Wales. My only concern is that I cannot agree on behalf
of the entire Department because the DHS CIO is the one
ultimately responsible for DHS systems.
Senator Portman. Let us set a milestone in two weeks that
we will have substantially all the answers, at least those that
you have the ability to answer.
Mr. Wales. OK.
Senator Portman. Because I think the sooner the better,
since we are moving ahead with legislation, even during this
month before the next congressional recess.
Mr. Wales. Agreed.
Senator Portman. Second is we talked a lot about funding
today, and the American Rescue Plan, as you know, provided $650
million to CISA for various ways to help modernize cyber
systems. You mentioned hardening the cloud earlier. Can you in
one minute or less just tell us precisely how you expect to use
that $650 million?
Mr. Wales. Sure, so four primary lines of effort.
First is beginning to expand our cyber defensive teams so
that we can spend more time doing persistent hunt activity
inside of Federal agencies.
Second is the deployment of new technologies and sensors
inside of networks, endpoint detection and response tools that
will give us better visibility for agencies and better
visibility for CISA into what is happening on those networks.
Three, the deployment of pilot secure, threat-hardened
cloud environment for business systems to allow us to test the
most effective way to secure and defend those and then
promulgate a reference architecture across the dot-gov----
Senator Portman. That would be focused primarily on the
private sector and their ability to use a hardened cloud?
Mr. Wales. It is primarily focused on testing a private
cloud for the Federal Government civilian agencies that more
Federal agencies can then use. Right now there is, I would say,
a variety of different kind of cloud security environments that
Federal agencies have adopted, and we want more consistency----
Senator Portman. Right, more secure than others, OK. But it
would not respond to the Colonial type----
Mr. Wales. No. I mean, again, the----
Senator Portman. What is the fourth one?
Mr. Wales. The fourth one is additional funding to help
accelerate the move toward more defensible and secure
architecture. It is helping agencies move toward zero trust-
based approaches for their security and build more defensible
and secure network configurations in architecture.
Senator Portman. OK. I appreciate that. This was part of
the COVID-19 package, the American Rescue package. I am glad
the money is being used and used productively. I cannot see how
it has any connection to COVID-19, by the way, which is
unfortunately true with much of that legislation. But the money
has been appropriated. We need the help right now, and we will
be eager to see how this money is being spent. We will be
overseeing it, and my sense is that what you are doing is going
to be helpful to the broader mission of CISA that we are trying
to work on through legislation.
My final question has to do with what just happened with
regard to SolarWinds. There has been a news report that has not
been confirmed or denied by the Department of Homeland Security
that the SolarWinds attack not only attacked agencies and, as
you know, had a major detrimental impact on nine different
Federal agencies, at least, but specifically it was an attack
on DHS and that two areas, according to this report, were
subject to this massive attack. One is DHS' foreign threat
hunting teams were actually breached. And second is that the
Secretary of DHS' email account was actually breached.
Can you confirm that that is true?
Mr. Wales. Sir, in an opening hearing, what I can say is
that a small number of accounts at the Department and at CISA
were compromised during this incident.
Senator Portman. Are the foreign threat hunting teams part
of CISA?
Mr. Wales. We have threat hunting teams--again, I am not
sure about the use of the term ``foreign'' there, but we do
have threat hunting teams. Those are the teams that provide
incident response and hunt support to our Federal agency
partners. But I will just make one small comment, and that is,
the compromise at DHS only affected our business email
networks. It did not affect our operational networks where most
of our cybersecurity work is done, things that manage our
EINSTEIN system, the system that our incident response teams
use as part of when they go onsite and support other agencies.
So this would be the compromises were limited to business email
and not to our actual operational work.
Senator Portman. Can you confirm that the Secretary's email
account was breached?
Mr. Wales. I am going to defer that question to the
Department's CIO who is responsible for it.
Senator Portman. As you know, former Secretary Wolf
confirmed publicly that his email account was breached. He said
so on April 12, 2021.
I would also like to put the Associated Press (AP) story in
the record.\1\ I would like to ask unanimous consent (UC), Mr.
Chairman, to do so. It indicated that the former Secretary and
that DHS was compromised by this attack. We need to know the
information, and if it is classified, we understand. We have
had a classified briefing, by the way, since you and I last
talked at a public hearing, where we would have had the
opportunity to receive that information, and we did not. We
need to know what is going on to be able to legislate properly
and to provide the proper oversight.
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\1\ The AP story appears in the Appendix on page 00.
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I want to end by thanking you for your testimony today, for
your ongoing communication with me and our staff and Senator
Peters and his staff, and your professionalism. It is an
impossible task right now. The enemy is moving very quickly,
both foreign state actors and cyber criminals, and we have to
move even more quickly. We have to stay ahead of them. And
whether it is personnel and dragging our feet on having the
right cyber workforce is a major frustration to me in the
Federal Government--we talked about the 2014 legislation that
is still not properly enacted--or whether it is in regard to
keeping our systems up to speed, and particularly what is going
on in the cloud, we have to stay ahead of them. I hope you will
remain committed to this task and provide the leadership to be
able to respond to this very difficult challenge.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters [presiding]. Thank you, Senator Portman.
You are absolutely right. We need to have the information. We
will endeavor to make sure that that happens.
We certainly do not have infinite resources, and we need to
evaluate the risk facing our most sensitive systems which
continue to fall victim to these attacks, as we have talked
about throughout this hearing. As Ranking Member Portman
brought up, we have at least two Cabinet Secretaries that were
targeted.
So my question is first to Ms. Vogel. How does HHS assess
its risk posture to cyber attacks? And then how do you allocate
resources against those risks?
Ms. Vogel. Thank you for the question. When it comes to
risk, one of the things we have become very engaged in is our
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Council, where we bring
different risks together, and then we are able to balance them
and look at what we can all do from different disciplines on
protecting the Department.
When we look at our risk, we have a risk score that we look
through all of the regulations and we apply our current
assessment of our activities against that. This is a
continually changing environment, and we have to go back to
that time and time again.
As we look at this, some of the things that we recognize
is, for example, in the past where we looked very strongly
toward penetration testing to protect us at the perimeter, we
are now looking more internally to see through threat hunting
teams how we can think ahead and be creative, because we know
our adversaries are doing that.
So as we look at that, we are slightly shifting some of our
resources, and we are looking at what we can do more toward
identity and access and restricting to go toward more of a zero
trust type of environment. In addition, we are trying to
balance the operational technology with the business
technology. One would not necessarily work without the other,
but we are also trying to protect it system by system,
environment by environment.
Those are some of the things that we are doing right now,
and we are doing quite a bit of outreach and education because
we feel that our employees are our first protection. They will
notice things and report things. We are trying to get them
onboard and not think of cybersecurity as something separate or
something somebody else is supposed to do. So as we incorporate
that in our work environment, we are also trying to balance the
risk. That gives us a lot more coverage. Those are some of the
things that we are doing now.
Chairman Peters. So those are within the Department. Kind
of a follow-up question to that is: How did some of the recent
supply chain compromises of Federal vendors that we have seen,
how does that change your risk assessment and how dynamic is
that?
Ms. Vogel. We take that very seriously. One of the major
risks that we have addressed as a Department recently is
acquisition and looking up front at what we can do to build in
that prevention based on supply chain needs.
We also have an area that looks just at medical devices and
keeping them up to date and making sure that we share enough
information with the health care community that they can be as
protected at their end as possible. We look internally and we
look externally.
Chairman Peters. Very good.
Senator Hawley, you are recognized for your questions.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HAWLEY
Senator Hawley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And
thanks to the witnesses for being here.
Mr. Wales, if I could just start with you. In the first
SolarWinds attack, it has been publicly reported that there
were approximately 100 private sector computers that were
affected. I am wondering if there is anything you can tell us
about the profile of these companies, if there are any common
threads. Were they largely, for instance, technology companies
or finance companies or industrial companies?
Mr. Wales. Sure. They were largely in the technology space,
although there were a couple in the nonprofit space. You could
imagine the kind of entities that a foreign intelligence
service would want to compromise to gain information about U.S.
thinking on critical foreign policy questions.
Senator Hawley. And is that what you think is the common
thread here in terms of the companies that were targeted, the
private sector companies that were targeted?
Mr. Wales. I would say that they would fall under two
classes: those that had information that the adversary wanted
to gain access to, and those that were potentially future
avenues for additional attacks, going after additional
technology companies. So trying to look for additional
opportunities to compromise supply chains.
Senator Hawley. Got it. Following the first attack, the
Cyber Unified Coordination Group put out a joint statement
expressing their view that the threat was likely Russian in
origin and it was predominantly an intelligence-gathering
effort. That was January. We are about five months on from
that. Is that attack still largely viewed as an intelligence-
gathering effort? Or do we think there was at this juncture any
intention to conduct economic espionage or sabotage of any
kind?
Mr. Wales. I think right now we understand it to be largely
a cyber espionage operation, but I think as we have said
before, once you have this kind of broad access, what you do
with it can expand greatly. While initially it has been focused
on cyber espionage, where it may have gone in the future we do
not know.
Senator Hawley. Let me ask you about the second publicly
reported SolarWinds attack that took place in February, early
February of this year. At the time several nongovernmental
assessments had attributed that to another State actor, to
China. In March, you told me and the Committee that much of
that public reporting was inaccurate, such as the reporting
that said that the National Finance Center (NFC) had been
targeted.
To the extent that you are able to say in this setting, is
there any update that you can provide us about that second
attack?
Mr. Wales. I do not believe that we have changed our stance
on public attribution. What I can say is that another actor did
identify a vulnerability in SolarWinds software. So unlike the
case of the SVR operation where they inserted a vulnerability,
inserted a back door, in this case there was just a
vulnerability in the software that was discovered by another
malicious actor. They did use that to compromise some
SolarWinds devices in a number of different places, but the
judgment on the National Financing Center has not changed.
Senator Hawley. We still believe this is a second state
actor that carried this out? Are you able to say?
Mr. Wales. I am not able to say.
Senator Hawley. Let me ask you about an article in Reuters
recently. An anonymous cybersecurity expert was quoted--who, by
the way, had some familiarity with the Pulse Secure attack and
the Federal response. This person was quoted as saying that
that attack was a combination of traditional espionage with
some element of economic theft.
Let me ask you if you think that that assessment is
correct. Broadly speaking, did the Pulse attack involve some
economic theft?
Mr. Wales. I am not aware of any specific economic theft
from that operation, but I would say that we are still trying
to understand the full scope of what happened during the Pulse
Secure campaign. There may have been targeting of private
sector entities that we are not aware of that would shed
further light on the objectives of the adversary in that case.
Senator Hawley. So is it fair to say that the recent
attacks that have been attributed to China, like the Pulse
attack, have been more focused on economic theft than the
Russian-based intelligence-gathering cyber attacks like
SolarWinds? Or do you think that that is a mis-assessment?
Mr. Wales. I would say in general that is consistent with
our understanding of Chinese targeting objectives.
Senator Hawley. Very good.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Hawley.
Mr. Wales, I would certainly hope that CISA as the lead
operational agency for Federal cybersecurity, you would have a
real comprehensive understanding of the cybersecurity risk
across the entire Federal Government, each of the component
parts of that. So my question is, and please be very frank: Do
you have the insight that you need into every agency's risk
posture to form that kind of comprehensive understanding right
now?
Mr. Wales. No.
Chairman Peters. What do you need? What should this
Committee focus on to give you the tools necessary to have that
kind of comprehensive understanding, which is clearly
necessary?
Mr. Wales. I think this is an area where, to set
expectations about our ability to fully understand the risk
profile at 102 different Federal civilian Executive Branch
agencies, including some large, complex agencies with multiple
subcomponents like the ones I am testifying with today, fully
understanding their risk environment is going to be
challenging. They will use a variety of different systems.
Those systems will have various different functions. And
understanding the importance of those different functions, what
happens if there is a disruption, is always going to be a
challenge, regardless of level of insight we need, relevance
that we have.
That being said, I think that there are critical
improvements that we want to have, many of which we are already
starting based upon the resources in the American Rescue Plan
Act, based upon new authorities that we have had provided to
us, to expand our ability to understand the cybersecurity
posture of our Federal partners and where critical improvements
are needed. I think I want to start there and then build on
that base, and while, a full understanding of the risk profile
of every Federal agency and its subelements might be a goal in
the future, we have some shorter-term goals that I think we
need to achieve first.
Chairman Peters. Very good. You can count on us as a
Committee working closely with you and all of our agencies to
make sure we get to the place where we need to be.
I want to take this opportunity to thank again our
witnesses for testifying here this morning. I think we can all
agree on our reliance on cyber infrastructure makes
cybersecurity a higher priority, and it is a higher priority
each and every passing year. 2021 started with SolarWinds, and
the incidents have just continued to occur.
I think we have heard some very interesting things here
today as we continue to work on this topic in the weeks,
months, and years ahead. FISMA clearly needs some adjustments
to ensure agencies and CISA have the information necessary to
understand our risk and allocate our resources to address those
risks that have been identified. The law needs to reflect the
intent of Congress so there is no ambiguity, so there is no
confusion on when and if an agency needs to declare a major
incident and notify Congress about those events. We need to do
this by evaluating the scale and the scope of an attack as well
as the impact on an individual agency.
What we heard today I think makes clear that to combat
today's cyber enemies, we must work at one holistic Federal
unit. Our enemies' increased sophistication during the
SolarWinds cyber incident and continued willingness to inflict
harm on Americans, as witnessed during this weekend's
ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, shows that
cybersecurity is and is going to remain a national security
priority for the foreseeable future.
This Committee will continue to investigate the scope of
these recent incidents, and we are going to work to address the
risk and challenges that are critical to helping modernize
cyber infrastructure. That includes ensuring that our
government is prepared to respond efficiently and effectively
during a major cyber incident.
This Committee is also committed to addressing the cyber
workforce issues facing the government, as several members
discussed during their questions. This is something that I have
worked on and want to continue to work very closely with the
administration to get done.
Again, thank you to all of our witnesses, Ranking Member
Portman, and other Members of the Committee, and with that, the
hearing record will remain open for 15 days, until May 26 at 5
p.m., for the submissions of statements and questions for the
record.
This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:48 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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