Cybersecurity Operations Group

Overview of UC San Diego Cybersecurity Operations Group

The Cybersecurity Operations Group (CSOG) is a standing committee sponsored by the Chancellor charged with implementing elements of the campus cybersecurity program across academic, research and administrative units. UC San Diego’s cybersecurity program takes a risk-based approach to cybersecurity, tailoring the treatment of risk as appropriate to the mission and goals of the activities being secured. CSOG is chaired by Chief Information Officer Vince Kellen and co-chaired by Chancellor Pradeep Khosla.

Neither a planning nor policy group, CSOG focuses on implementing a modest set of discrete security practices that can be measured and that advance our cybersecurity posture. These are tackled by the core team sequentially in order to achieve a reasonable level of practice across all areas of the UC San Diego cyber environment. 

CSOG has two teams:

• A leadership team consisting of unit heads as defined by UC San Diego’s implementation of the systemwide information security policy, IS-3. 

• A core team consisting of the IT leads for each of the units represented by the unit heads. These are, for the purposes of IS-3, the Unit Information Security Liaisons. This team meets twice a month.

The leadership team meets quarterly with the core team to be briefed on the progress of the core team in implementing cybersecurity measures for their units.

Current Operational Targets

Note: while this list is dynamic and represents current work items, each goal is mandated by the UC systemwide information security policy IS-3, and as such, will be required of systems, wherever applicable.

• Ensure the wide deployment of the two security programs, Trellix (formerly FireEye) HX and Qualys cloud agent
• Inventory administrative accounts and ensure they are protected by multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Enable DUO MFA for critical servers not otherwise protected by MFA (requiring inventory of them)
• Reduce critical vulnerabilities in systems.