Ahead of a comprehensive Obama administration review of the U.S. government's cybersecurity posture, consulting firm Gartner said Thursday that the country needs to take a more operational approach toward the problem rather than focusing on strategies to drive higher spending or higher visibility for security. Although there is a definite role for government to play in accelerating progress toward higher levels of cybersecurity, it will be more akin to trying to deal with global warming than dealing with telephone, banking, or automotive industry policies, Gartner Vice President John Pescatore said. "Different approaches are required to ensure reliable and secure services in cyberspace than on old telecom networks, and the development of public policy has to proceed very differently, as well," he said in a press release. Government policy that attempts to force top-down solutions onto an inherently peer-to-peer problem will always fail, he said.

Pescatore said a national cybersecurity strategy should not be aimed at having the government seek to control the level of security on the Internet or issue legislations to mandate solutions. Rather, the strategy should focus primarily on using public policy and the government's buying power to accelerate progress in eliminating vulnerabilities that enable attacks versus simply driving increased reporting of attacks. "A successful national cyberscurity strategy will look more like a hurricane preparedness strategy that mandates redesigning structures or building higher levees versus the deployment of more water gauges," Gartner said. In a new report, analysts said several key elements should be the focus of U.S. government strategy for cybersecurity. One notable recommendation is for the administration to establish a federal chief information security office, not a federal cybersecurity czar. Read more recommendations after the jump...

• Stop studying, and start acting. There have been plenty of existing efforts to define and measure the shortcomings of cybersecurity, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
• Harmonize federal security standards with commercial equivalents. Although there will always be a need for higher levels of security than commercial standards allow, harmonizing the base level will eliminate duplication and waste and enable the government to drive suppliers to higher levels of security more easily. Similar harmonization at the federal level of data privacy and disclosure rules is needed, as well.
• Use purchasing power to drive security to be built-in. Because the key to increasing cybersecurity lies in reducing vulnerabilities, all software procurements should require application vulnerability testing as part of the acceptance criteria.
• Evaluate existing regulations, and rejuvenate enforcement. There are areas where federal legislation is needed to harmonize conflicting state laws, but the biggest bang for the federal buck will be in the actual enforcement of existing rules and regulations.
• Keep offense and defense separate. The primary goal of a cybersecurity strategy must be to make attacks ineffective through prevention rather than detect successful attacks by enabling surveillance. Combining the two functions will inevitably result in lower levels of security and possibly increased privacy violations.
• Reward best practices. Most of the publicity tends to go toward the government agencies with low Federal Information Security Management Act scores in annual audits, and currently there seems to be little or no effort to spread best practices across agencies.
• Establish a federal chief information security office, not a federal cybersecurity czar. The bottom line is that increasing the national cybersecurity is an operations issue. The problems are well-understood, solutions are known, and gaps have been identified. Organizations with high security in private industry and government almost invariably have a strong security office and a chief information security officer (CISO), and that should be the model that the U.S. government follows.