Pending approval by the Legislature of a $2.6 million budget request, CDCR information security officer Vitaliy Panych said he intends to move as quickly as possible to recruit and hire eight staff and get the new SOC up and running sometime in fall 2017.
"One of the main challenges will be finding the people. The information security job market is pretty scarce," Panych told Techwire on Thursday. "We'll have positions at both the entry level and the senior level. It's really a matter of getting qualified people; I'm going to be recruiting the heck out of people."
Panych said the SOC will have dedicated office space within the CDCR, likely at CDCR's Aerojet campus in Rancho Cordova or at an existing communications center the department operates in downtown Sacramento.
One of the main duties of the new cyberteam will be to proactively hook into CDCR's systems and hunt for unusual behavior, malicious abuse and insider threats.
"Corrections is a big place, there's a lot of employees. We deal with inmates and technology is being extended to them," Panych said. "With the passage of Prop 57, there are a lot of education and rehabilitation efforts being driven to inmates. ... For us, what that means for security is that anytime we provision any kind of access to systems or technology, there's a likelihood it will get abused and be used in a malicious manner."
The corrections department's security operations center will be linked to a broader SOC the California Department of Technology plans to build itself, as well as the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-SIC), in order to share data and threat intelligence.
"In short, we are building our own, but it will be 'wired' to the Department of Technology/CalSIC. Kind of a first-layer and second-layer approach. We will be at a more granular level, but feeding the state SOC with our info," CDCR chief information officer Russ Nichols explained via email.
Market Analysis
The build-out of Security Operations Centers within California state government looks like a trend in the making. The California Department of Motor Vehicles opened its own SOC in late 2015, and Techwire toured the facility. Now the California Department of Technology said it will build its own too. That's on top of the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC) that makes its debut in 2016.There's a market opportunity in each of these new facilities. CDCR proposed to spend $1.5 million on hardware, software and vendor services for its SOC, according to budget documents.
