In a surprise move, the Obama administration is expected to announce abandonment of NIST’s Framework for FISMA in lieu of adopting the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

In information leaked to the Guerilla-CISO staff, an undisclosed source deep inside the 60-day cybersecurity review made the following observations:

• Since everybody is complaining that FISMA is failing, the time for change is now while the Government is still in transition chaos.
• The leading metrics support the fact that the Payment Card Industry standards do work.
• There exists a large, relatively inexpensive and certified workforce focused around PCI-DSS.  This is preferrable to the expensive, non-certified FISMA compliance workforce.
• Billions of credit card transactions occur every day.  How could Visa and MasterCard be wrong?
• WAFs and code review are all we need in a web-enabled Government 2.0 world.
• PCI flip-flops on data encryption and the use of DLP solutions, so do we.
• Since one compliance framework is as good as another, we might as well pool our resources.
• A significant amount of money is spent on FISMA compliance.  That would all be eliminated under a PCI compliance framework.
• Technologies such as Scanless PCI can reduce the audit burden on the agencies to a couple bottles of beer and a handshake.
• The House testimony on the effectiveness of PCI-DSS was convincing that it is a viable standard.

In the interests of due diligence in reporting, the Guerilla-CISO staff tried to contact NIST’s Computer Security Resource Center and gained the following unofficial opinion:

“Screw those Obama guys.  Where were they when we were trying to create Government 1.0 and the FISMA Framework?  They haven’t put in the all-nighters because some yahoo at an agency lost a USB drive full of classified documents–they don’t have the experience to make this call.  I bet the administration thinks that they can outsource all responsibility to the cloud and get some ‘security through abstraction’.  Talk about gratitude for you, I’m going to go work for the International Standards Organization.”

PCI Plug-and-Play photo by ryan_franklin_az.

• Inside the Obama Administration’s Cyber Security Agenda
• Opportunity Costs and the 20 Critical Security Controls
• Beware the Cyber-Katrina!
• Why We Need PCI-DSS to Survive
• Random Thoughts on “The FISMA Challenge” in eHealthcare