CISA Publishes 2020 Chemical Security Presentations

This week the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) updated their Chemical Security Summit web site to include links to most of the presentations that were made last month in the three-day virtual summit. For the first time, I was able to watch many of these presentations live (well… online in real time).

The available presentations include:

• CFATS Personnel Surety Program Demonstration and Lessons Learned,

• CFATS Risk-Based Performance Standards Deep Dive and Best Practices,

• Chemical Sector Security Awareness Training,

• Cyber and Physical Security in Manufacturing Environments,

• Cybersecurity Evaluation Tool (CSET),

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Response: Hurricanes, Wildfires, Floods, and Pandemics,

• Incentivizing Facility Security: A Nonregulatory Approach,

• Jack Rabbit III Initiatives, and

• Transportation Security Administration Surface Operations Overview

As is usual with these Summit presentations, what you get is the slides not the audio portion and the real detail of most of these presentations is in the audio. I know, those audio files would be huge, but it would be much more informative and a better representation of the work that went into these presentations.

I was really surprised that CISA included Annie Hunziker Boyer’s presentation on the ongoing development of the voluntary chemical security program in the Infrastructure Security Compliance Division. Since she emphasized multiple times that this program was still ‘under development’ and would likely change before it was finally implemented, I was sure that the government lawyers were going to insist that the publication of these slides be withheld. Now that these slides are available, I will probably do a post on this initiative.

I was disappointed that one of the other presentations from the December 16^th session was not included in this list of provided presentations, “Infrastructure Visualization Tools”. This presentation by the CISA Infrastructure Visualization Platform (IVP) Team was a good look at a new tool developed by the team to provide an interactive visual look at an infrastructure location; think Google Street View® that includes inside the gates with interior shots. This would be a great training tool for emergency personnel prepping for high-risk facility responses.