Interior CDM effort 'immature,' says watchdog report

More than a year after it projected having Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Phase 1 protections in place, the Interior Department still has work to do on its cybersecurity efforts, according to a partially redacted report released by the agency's inspector general on Oct. 17.

Auditors reviewed CDM implementation at the department's three largest bureaus -- the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the U.S. Geological Survey -- and found that all were ineffective at guarding high-value IT assets from potential loss or disruption, potentially leaving them open to "wide-reaching adverse effects."

Interior officials had set Sept. 30, 2014, as the implementation date of CDM Phase 1 but moved its operational goal by five years -- to 2019. According to the report, the bureaus either failed to implement all four CDM Phase 1 controls or implemented them incompletely or ineffectively.

Furthermore, Interior lacks "an accurate inventory of its computers; therefore, it can neither identify unauthorized and potentially rogue devices nor effectively manage, monitor and report the security status of all devices connected to its network," the report states.

The department has similar issues when it comes to software. Interior "failed to establish and implement approved software lists to ensure that unapproved, unsupported or potentially malicious software (i.e., malware) [was] not present on bureau computers," auditors wrote.The shortcomings were due to a mix of factors, with the decentralized nature of the department's components at their heart, auditors said. For instance, Interior's CIO did not require bureaus to follow recommended best practices for vulnerability detection or mitigation.

The IG made six recommendations aimed at strengthening the CDM program at the department. They include adding enterprise-level monitoring and reporting for all devices and software practices, establishing a departmentwide configuration baseline for computers and monitoring operating system settings to ensure that computers remain securely configured.

According to the report, the CIO's office has begun implementing the recommendations, but the issue of quarantining some critically vulnerable systems remains unresolved.