Rishi Iyengar
U.S. President Joe Biden has had a rough couple of years on the cyber frontier. He inherited a massive hack that hit dozens of federal agencies, uncovered weeks before he took office, followed by two ransomware attacks that extracted more than $15 million from America’s largest oil pipeline and the world’s biggest meat producer (only a fraction of it was recovered), followed by a year spent helping protect Ukraine’s digital environment from Russia, the country linked to all three of those incidents. Now, Biden wants to make sure the second half of his term is less eventful than the first.
The administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy, released to the public on Thursday, lays out a plan to “use all instruments of national power to disrupt and dismantle threat actors whose actions threaten our interests,” including diplomatic, financial, and military responses. “We have a duty to the American people to also double down on tools that only government can wield, including the law enforcement and military authorities to disrupt malicious cyber activity and pursue their perpetrators,” Kemba Walden, the acting national cyber director, told reporters on Wednesday.
Multiple former officials and experts commended the document as a groundbreaking step forward in shoring up U.S. cyber defenses—providing a clear vision and plan for government and the private sector alike. “This is, I think, the best cybersecurity strategy the government has ever produced,” said Jonathan Reiber, vice president of cybersecurity strategy and policy at software company AttackIQ, who served as chief strategy officer for cyber policy in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Obama administration. “This is not rhetoric—this is like measurable technological and economic outcomes that they’re looking for. And that is really what’s required when we’re talking about changing the cybersecurity landscape.”
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