Securing Tomorrow’s Health: Unveiling the Crucial Role of DHMSM’s Information Systems Security Engineers in Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is a broad term with many associated positions that provide specific roles and responsibilities. At DHMSM we provide Information Systems Security Officers (ISSOs) and Information Systems Security Engineers (ISSEs) professional services to the legacy electronic health record (EHR) systems. Today’s article will center on our ISSE team led by Justin Johnson. He along with Rochelle Brown and Christopher Tillison support the DOD Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) Cybersecurity Engineering Branch.
SeKON’s ISSEs are tasked with providing hands-on technical expertise to assess and evaluate the security posture of the DHMSM systems. Their primary responsibilities are defending the systems from cyber-attacks by identifying vulnerabilities in our systems’ operating systems, applications, and infrastructure. This is accomplished using specialized scanning tools, custom scripts, and manual verification of Security Technical Implementation Guides. They were recently recognized by their government lead for: Identifying unusual Tanium and Trelix activity impacting system resources, thus causing delays and timeouts of the ACAS scans. They worked with the vendor to troubleshoot the issue with Tanium, Trelix, and HBSS through a series of trouble tickets. Scans are now coming back fully credentialed.”
SeKON ISSEs’ desire to remain on the cutting edge of cyber best practices led to the creation of labs environments to test the latest cyber tools and techniques. Some of those have crossed over into our daily operations such as implementing SPLUNK. Automation is one of the major initiatives we are currently implementing using APIs to automatically ingest testing data eliminating human error when manually uploading data. Lastly our ISSEs are working towards documenting their practices in a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to ensure consistency across the team and a way to train the next generation of ISSEs. Thank you to Justin, Rochelle, and Chris for all their hard work and dedication towards keeping our systems secure.
Written by Bryan Johnson, Cybersecurity SME
