The US government on Wednesday said it would work with industry players to hammer out new guidelines to improve the security of the technology supply chain, as US President Joe Biden appealed to private sector executives to “raise the bar on cybersecurity.”
At White House meetings with Biden and members of his Cabinet, executives from big tech firms, the finance industry and infrastructure companies said that they would do more about the growing threat of cyberattacks to the US economy.
“The federal government can’t meet this challenge alone,” Biden told the masked executives in the East Room, adding: “You have the power, the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity.”
After the meeting, the White House said that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) would work with industry and other partners on new guidelines for building secure technology and assessing the security of technology, including open source software.
Microsoft Corp, Google and cyberinsurance provider Coalition Inc, among others, committed to participating in the new NIST-led initiative.
Cybersecurity has risen to the top of the agenda for the Biden administration after a series of high-profile attacks on network management company SolarWinds Corp, the operator of the Colonial Pipeline, meat processing company JBS USA Holdings Inc and software firm Kaseya Ltd. The attacks hurt the US far beyond just the companies hacked, affecting fuel and food supplies.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Biden said, citing ransomware attacks and his push to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold Russia-based cybercrime gangs responsible, as well as the need to fill nearly half a million public and private cybersecurity jobs.
The guest list included Amazon.com Inc CEO Andy Jassy, Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google’s parent Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM CEO Arvind Krishna.
After the meeting, Amazon said it would make its cybersecurity training available to the public for free, and it would give multifactor authentication devices to some cloud computing customers, starting in October.
Microsoft said it would invest US$20 billion over five years, a fourfold increase from current rates, to speed up its cybersecurity work, and make US$150 million in technical services available to help US federal, state and local governments to help keep their security systems up to date.
IBM said it would train more than 150,000 people in cybersecurity skills over three years, and partner with historically black colleges and universities to create a more diverse cybersecurity workforce.
Google said it would devote US$10 billion to cybersecurity over the next five years, but it was not immediately clear what if any of the figure represented new spending.
It also said that it would help 100,000 Americans earn industry-recognized digital skills certificates that could lead to high-paying jobs.
The US Congress is weighing legislation on data breach notification laws and cybersecurity insurance industry regulation, historically viewed as two of the most consequential policy areas in the field.
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