USA releases Critical Functions List to prioritise protection from cyber-attacks

The US Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released al list of national critical functions of government and private sector that have vital importance to the US national and economic security, public health, and safety. The list covers all areas of critical infrastructures and divides them into four broad categories: connect, distribute, manage, and supply. The main purpose of the list is for cyber risk management and prioritisation in incident response and decision-making. The next step for CISA is the creation of a Risk Register to identify scenarios that could potentially cause national-level degradation to national critical functions and, according to the CISA director, ‘map out how a single digital threat might ricochet across numerous industries’.