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Tag Archives: Cyber Policy

White House to Hold Cyber Security Summit

 

In keeping with its focus on cyber security, The White House (which just approved a $1 billion increase in cyber funding for 2016) is hosting a first Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection this Friday at Stanford University.

Attendees include a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the tech industry, Wall Street, and various other industries, with the CEOs of Bank of America Corp., U.S. Bancorp, American Express, Kaiser Permanente, Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and PayPal, as well as Tim Cook from Apple and representatives from Facebook, Google, Intel, and various other companies.

Among the items on the agenda are:

  • Public-Private Collaboration on Cybersecurity
  • Improving Cybersecurity Practices at Consumer-Oriented Businesses and Organizations
  • Promoting More Secure Payment Technologies
  • Cybersecurity Information Sharing
  • International Law Enforcement Cooperation on Cybersecurity
  • Improving Authentication: Moving Beyond the Password

The White House has also stated that in order to strengthen America’s cyber security posture, its priorities are:

  1. Protecting the country’s critical infrastructure — our most important information systems — from cyber threats.
  2. Improving our ability to identify and report cyber incidents so that we can respond in a timely manner.
  3. Engaging with international partners to promote internet freedom and build support for an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable cyberspace.
  4. Securing federal networks by setting clear security targets and holding agencies accountable for meeting those targets.
  5. Shaping a cyber-savvy workforce and moving beyond passwords in partnership with the private sector.

 

 

It will be interesting to see how this shapes the future of America’s cyber policy and how the rest of the world reacts. If ApplePay becomes the de-facto e-payment standard, what does that mean for Android users? </s>

New U.S. Cyber Security Agency

Tuesday, the White House announced that the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center was being stood up in order to provide a comprehensive data sources for cyber security threats facing American governmental entities and private industries. There already exist several efforts to coordinate  and disseminate intelligence to appropriate parties in various fields (DHS Fusion Centers for law enforcement, InfraGard for critical infrastructure, etc.), but this is the first agency focused entirely on the collection, analysis, and dissemination of cyber security-related intelligence.  It will be interesting to see how this compares with the new Facebook-sponsored ThreatExchange, but it is likely all part of a united effort by the U.S. to secure its cyber infrastructure.