U.S. government enlists Microsoft for cyberdefense squad

Justice League Cyber is forming.

What you need to know

• CISA is enlisting tech giants to help it combat cyber threats.
• Microsoft is one of the companies being brought in to fight for its country.

The private and public sectors are about to rub shoulders again. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is forming a Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to "[...] bring people together in peacetime, so that we can plan for how we're going to respond in wartime," according to Jen Easterly, the director of CISA (via The Wall Street Journal).

Given the wide array of cyberattacks the U.S. government, and the country as a whole, has suffered in recent months, be they the Kaseya incident, SolarWinds situation, or Colonial Pipeline drama, it's not shocking that the country's leading security agencies are keen on putting a stop to the threats. How exactly Microsoft itself will be utilized in the U.S. government's cyber throwdowns with China and Russia (among others) remains to be seen.

Microsoft's not alone in the JCDC. Amazon, Google, and others are being brought into the mix as well in an effort to make cybercriminals' boots shake and teeth chatter.

You can check out the JCDC's webpage to get a better understanding of what the collaborative is aiming to achieve. Here's a mission statement from the page:

The Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) will lead the development of the Nation's cyber defense plans, which outline activities to prevent and reduce the impacts of cyber intrusions. Leveraging new authorities provided by the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2021, the JCDC will bring together public and private sector entities to unify deliberate and crisis action planning while coordinating the integrated execution of these plans. The plans will promote national resilience by coordinating actions to identify, protect against, detect, and respond to malicious cyber activity targeting U.S. critical infrastructure or national interests.

It remains to be seen whether the JCDC's existence will mean fewer U.S.-targeted cyberattack stories making their way into the daily news cycle.