An Everything Is On Fireside Chat

Keren Elazari moderates a fireside chat at BSides Las Vegas with Jen Easterly, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Easterly explains that CISA works as a voluntary partner rather than a regulator, intelligence collector or law enforcement body. Its mission centers on reducing risk to the critical infrastructure that people rely on every day, from water and health care to communications and banking. The conversation frames the hacker community as a group the agency wants to hear from and recruit.

A large part of the discussion covers secure by design, a set of principles written in business language so that senior leaders own security outcomes instead of pushing that burden onto small businesses and app developers. Easterly describes the feedback sessions planned at DEF CON and the agency's known exploited vulnerabilities catalog, which gives organizations a prioritized list of flaws already being abused in the wild. They also discuss coordinated vulnerability disclosure and the value of legal protections for good-faith security research.

The talk then turns to AI, where Easterly argues that trust in these systems is still in its early days. She outlines three CISA priorities: using AI for cyber defense, assuring AI systems through testing and audit, and addressing physical and cyber threats to critical infrastructure. She stresses transparency and resilience, planning on the assumption that bad things will happen and building the ability to recover. The session closes on workforce, with hiring efforts and an invitation for attendees to join the agency or send feedback.