DHS elevates Driggers to senior cyber post

Rick Driggers, the current principal deputy director of the national cyber situational awareness, incident response and management center at the Department of Homeland Security, will move over to the agency's Cybersecurity and Communications Office in the National Protection and Programs Directorate, agency officials confirmed to FCW.

The CS&C is in charge of securing .gov networks and works with critical infrastructure providers and the private sector to protect commercial networks.

Driggers will gradually take on the duties of deputy assistant secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications in the National Protection and Programs Directorate. Danny Toler, the current deputy assistant secretary, has told his employees he is retiring.

The moves were first reported in Politico's Morning Cybersecurity newsletter.

Driggers currently serves as principal deputy director of the National Cybersecurity Communications and Integration Center. The NCCIC is DHS' hub for cyber incident response and management. It houses the Computer Emergency Response Teams that are deployed to commercial and infrastructure companies in the wake of cyberattacks.

No replacement for Driggers at NCCIC has been named, said the DHS official.

DHS, NPPD and Congress have been moving to replace NPPD, and streamline and combine cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection operations closer together under a new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas), introduced a bill on July 24 to do just that. The bipartisan measure passed out of committee and is due for a vote in the full House.

This article was updated Aug. 14.