The US agency that defends federal networks did not have its own incident response playbook when it got hacked

TL;DR

CISA admitted it had no prepared playbook for a cybersecurity incident. A contractor leaked government credentials on GitHub. A journalist had to alert the agency.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency revealed in a postmortem report on Friday that it did not have a prepared response plan for handling a cybersecurity incident when one hit in May. CISA staff “had to spend time building [a playbook] during the early stages of the incident,” the agency said, recommending that organisations prepare playbooks for “all anticipated needs” rather than improvising in real time.

The incident began when a security researcher at cyber firm GitGuardian discovered that an employee of a CISA contractor had uploaded passwords, AWS GovCloud keys, and other sensitive credentials to a publicly accessible GitHub repository. The researcher tried to alert the contractor but received no response. Only after cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs contacted...

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