The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Security Operations Center (JSOC) has been officially certified as a Cybersecurity Service Provider (CSP) Center of Excellence, passing a cybersecurity assessment with “flying colors,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Justice officials said.
The evaluation spanned vulnerability management, malware protection, continuous monitoring, threat intelligence analytics, detection and response to threats. JSOC met all of the required standards and exceeded in 35 of the 40 cybersecurity evaluation areas, officials said. Certified Centers of Excellence leverage standard functions, terminology and data formats to coordinate cybersecurity incident response. Under the DHS CSP program, DHS SOCs must pass a formal assessment for certification or use the services of a certified provider.
JSOC is the first provider of Security Operations Center-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) for government customers and serves as the hub for network monitoring, incident response, cyber threat intelligence collection and cross-agency threat information sharing, according to the DOJ’s website.
Kenneth Bible, DHS chief information security officer said the achievement is a positive example of cross-agency collaboration. “The success of the DHS CSP program, and the partnership between DHS and DOJ, has shown that despite very different missions and compositions, DHS and other federal agencies can collaborate from a mature and common framework to effectively enhance our national cybersecurity posture,” he said.
The DOJ SOC assessment was the agency’s first review performed for a non-DHS agency, said Beth Cappello, DHS deputy chief information officer. “This successful assessment is a major milestone in the maturation of the DHS CSP program, from its incubation at Immigration & Customs Enforcement to assessing all DHS SOCs – to now a step closer to becoming a federal-wide program,” she said. “In the future, the CSP program hopes to provide assessments for other federal agencies.”
The assessment was conducted by a team of DHS personnel from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration.
