US President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for the 2016 fiscal year seeks US$14 billion for cybersecurity efforts across the US government to better protect federal and private networks from hacking threats.
The budget seeks an increase of about US$1.5 billion from this year’s US$12.5 billion devoted to cybersecurity spending.
Federal cybersecurity funding has steadily increased in recent years, from US$10.3 billion in 2013, reflecting the intensity of threats US companies and government agencies are facing from cyberintruders, both domestic and foreign.
The budget, released on Monday, calls for deployment of more intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, greater sharing of data with the private sector and other countries and more funding to beef up the government’s ability to respond to attacks.
The funding would support several specific programs, such as monitoring and diagnostics of federal computer networks, the EINSTEIN intrusion detection and prevention system and government-wide testing and incident-response training.
“Cyberthreats targeting the private sector, critical infrastructure and the federal government demonstrate that no sector, network or system is immune to infiltration by those seeking to steal commercial or government secrets and property or perpetrate malicious and disruptive activity,” the White House summary said.
It is unclear how much funding the Republican-controlled US Congress will dedicate to cybersecurity efforts during the next fiscal year.
Among various requests, the White House sought US$227 million for construction of a Civilian Cyber Campus, meant to spur public-private partnerships, and US$160 million for information technology and cybersecurity of the weapons program at the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Pentagon’s budget alone called for US$5.5 billion in funding for cybersecurity. The agency’s chief weapons tester last month told Congress that nearly every US weapons program showed “significant vulnerabilities” to cyberattacks, including misconfigured, unpatched and outdated software.
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