The Department of Homeland Security is not yet prepared to respond to an incident that shuts down a large part of most of the Internet’s critical infrastructure, the Government Accountability Office has said.
It said that while the department has started initiatives to improve the nation’s ability to recover from Internet disruptions — for example, working groups to facilitate coordination and exercises in which government and private industry practice responding to cyber events – that progress has been limited, and other initiatives lack time frames for completion.
As a result, relationships among the initiatives are not evident and the government is not adequately prepared to effectively coordinate public-private plans for recovering from a major Internet disruption, according to GAO-06-672.
Further, it said key legislation on critical infrastructure protection does not address roles and responsibilities in the event of a disruption, and other laws and regulations governing disaster response and emergency communications have never been used for Internet recovery.
