Obama Administration's IT Security Review

Today the White House released its 60-day review on cybersecurity policy, and the report -- as well as the administration's plan -- consists of five primary prongs: top-down leadership, education, distributed responsibility, information sharing, and encouraging innovation.From the White House's Weblog:

The review team's report to the president contains five main chapters, outlined below, and includes a near-term action plan for U.S. government activities to strengthen cybersecurity.

"Chapter I: Leading from the Top -- Makes the case for strengthening cybersecurity leadership for the United States through 1) the establishment of a Presidential cybersecurity policy official and supporting structures, 2) reviewing laws and policies, and 3) strengthening cybersecurity leadership and accountability at federal, state, local, and tribal levels.

Chapter II: Building Capacity for a Digital Nation -- Advocates a national dialogue on cybersecurity to increase public awareness of the threats and risks and how to reduce them. Outlines the need for increased education efforts at all levels to ensure a technologically advanced workforce in cybersecurity and related areas, similar to the United States' focus on mathematics and science education in the 1960s. Identifies the need to expand and improve the federal information technology workforce and for the Federal government to facilitate programs and information sharing on cybersecurity threats, vulnerabilities, and effective practices across all levels of government and industry.

Chapter III: Sharing Responsibility for Cybersecurity -- Discusses the need for improving and expanding partnerships between the Federal government and both the private sector and key U.S. allies.

Chapter IV: Creating Effective Information Sharing and Incident Response -- The United States needs a comprehensive framework to facilitate coordinated responses by government, the private sector, and allies to a significant cyber incident. This chapter explores elements of such a framework and suggests enhancements to information sharing mechanisms to improve incident response capabilities.

Chapter V: Encouraging Innovation -- The chapter addresses ways for the United States to harness the benefits of innovation to address cybersecurity concerns, including work with the private sector to define performance and security objectives for future infrastructure, linking research and development to infrastructure development and expanding coordination of government, industry, and academic research efforts. It also addresses supply chain security and national security / emergency preparedness telecommunications efforts.

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I'll be posting more analysis on the plan soon. The full 60-day review is available here.

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