The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the expansion of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to include Industrial Control Systems (ICS) leaders to further increase the U.S. cybersecurity and resilience of industrial control systems and operational technology (ICS/OT). 

The JCDC was initially established in August 2021 to transform traditional public-private partnerships into real-time private-public operational collaboration and shift the paradigm from reacting to threats and vulnerabilities to proactively planning and taking steps to mitigate them. 

Security vendors, integrators, and distributors initially joining the JCDC-ICS effort include Bechtel, Claroty, Dragos, Honeywell, Nozomi, Schneider Electric, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Siemens, and Xylem, as well as several JCDC Alliance partners.

“Cyber threats to the systems that control and operate the critical infrastructure we rely on every day are among our greatest challenges,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said while speaking to ICS experts at the S4x22 conference in Miami. “As the destruction or corruption of these control systems could cause grave harm, ensuring their security and resilience must be a collective effort that taps into the innovation, expertise, and ingenuity of the ICS community. I’m excited to leverage our evolving JCDC platform to enable us to plan, exercise, and collaborate with industry leaders to drive down risk to the systems and networks we depend on so greatly as a nation.”

JCDC-ICS will build on the existing platform of the JCDC by taking advantage of the knowledge, visibility, and capabilities of the ICS community to build plans around the protection and defense of control systems; inform U.S. government guidance on ICS/OT cybersecurity; and contribute to real-time operational fusion across private and public partners in the ICS/OT space.

More information is available at www.cisa.gov/ics.