The office is responsible for seeking out threats across multiple agencies and departments but has a special focus on critical infrastructure.
"As individuals, we might be worried about somebody hacking into our system and making our milk spoil. From a state and national perspective, we're more interested in who can create havoc on our critical infrastructure," Mario Garcia, Deputy Commander of Cal-CSIC, said on a Securing California panel discussion at Tuesday's California Tech Forum. "California has a significant amount of communications, defense, financial services, food and agriculture, information technology, nuclear, transportation, water and wastewater treatment. These are all areas we have to protect."
The bridging supervisory control and data acquisition systems in industry and infrastructure to the Internet of Things has made security intelligence even more important.
"It's almost where we were, prior to and ramping up to Y2K, in the year 2000. We're almost at the point where we're having to replace almost every firmware, every software, every hardware in the infrastructure control area because they just weren't designed with cybersecurity as their strength," Garcia said.
Controls on dam spillways, communication towers and nuclear plant environments are some examples of infrastructure that are now controlled over a network and thus at risk to infiltration by hackers.
The center is co-located with the cybersecurity task force and often combine efforts.
Garcia and his colleagues pull from multiple streams of intelligence, provided by both private- and public-sector entities. The information is then analyzed and compared across agency data to "help minimize any particular threat."
The agency focuses on building partnerships, including the:
- Department of Health and Human Services
- California Department of Technology
- University of California
- California University System
- California Community Colleges
- Military Department
- Local jurisdictions
- Tribal groups
- Federal Bureau of Investigation
- Department of Defense
- Department of Homeland Security
