Megan Samford, VP & Chief Product Security Officer of Schneider Electric’s energy management business, is one of the first four people in the world to be recognized by the U.S. Government as a credentialed cyber first responder under the federal Incident Command System (ICS).
Helping companies recover from cyber incidents
The ISA Global Cybersecurity Alliance (ISAGCA) and the Incident Command System for Industrial Control Systems (ICS4ICS) released this cybersecurity first responder credentialing program, which adopts FEMA's Incident Command System framework for response structure, roles, and interoperability. This is the system used by First Responders globally when responding to hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, industrial accidents, and other high impact situations.
“For many years, we’ve needed ICS4ICS, to enable collectively organized cyber and physical responses in a unified way. Credentialing cybersecurity first responders is an important milestone in this valuable public-private partnership,” says Megan, who is also an ISAGCA Advisory Board chairperson and ICS4ICS leader. “We’ve developed an adjudication process and certified our first four responders. I’m proud to be one of them and stand ready to help companies recover from cyber incidents.”
Applying Incident Command Systems best practices
Incident Command Systems have been tested over more than 30 years of emergency and non-emergency applications, throughout all levels of government and within the private sector.
The ICS4ICS approach guides companies, organizations, and municipalities in identifying an incident, assessing damage, addressing immediate challenges, communicating with the right agencies and stakeholders, and resuming day to day operations. The framework applies traditional Incident Command Systems best practices to cybersecurity incidents, ensuring common terminology and enabling diverse incident management and support entities to work together. ICS4ICS provides clearly defined command structures, including standard roles needed in a response, and the framework can scale to support small or extremely large-scale incidents that impact many organizations.
The adjudication process, managed by a formal committee within ICS4ICS, consists of an application process and panel of incident command system (ICS) subject matter experts who evaluate the candidate’s submittal.
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