Anti-hacking federal cybersecurity agency is itself hacked | State

Anyone can be hacked — including, according to The Washington Times, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government’s premier anti-hacking agency.

The newspaper reported Tuesday that CISA recently acknowledged that hackers breached its systems earlier this year to access details of its Chemical Security Assessment Tool, which the government uses to collect information from facilities with dangerous chemicals that could be weaponized by terrorists.

The chemical assessment tool “was the target of a cybersecurity intrusion by a malicious actor from Jan. 23-26,” CISA said on its website this month. “While CISA’s investigation found no evidence of exfiltration of data, this intrusion may have resulted in the potential unauthorized access of Top-Screen Surveys, Security Vulnerability Assessments, Site Security Plans, Personnel Surety Program (PSP) submissions, and CSAT user accounts.”

The federal cyber agency was quoted by the Times as saying it has notified participants in the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program about the digital intrusion and potentially exposed information.

“All of us should understand that no one is immune from cyber attacks, even CISA,” said Waleed Farag, Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s point man on cybersecurity matters.

Farag is a professor of computer science at IUP, director of the IUP Institute for Cybersecurity and program director of the Department of Defense-Pennsylvania Community College Consortium Cooperative Agreement Project, as well as IUP’s Chinese Language Immersion Program, Autonomous Risk Mitigation Research Project, DoD Cyber Scholarship, the NCAE-C (National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity) PhD Cybersecurity Scholarship, GenCyber and the IoT (Internet of Things) Anomaly Detection Research Project.

“I believe that decision makers should be very aware of that continual risk and should do their best to allocate all needed resources to counter this persistent threat,” Farag said in an email to The Indiana Gazette.

While CISA said…