Biden signs executive order aiming to prevent future cybersecurity disasters

President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday implementing new insurance policies aimed to enhance nationwide cybersecurity. The executive order comes within the wake of plenty of current cybersecurity catastrophes, reminiscent of final week’s ransomware assault that took down the Colonial Pipeline, the Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities which will have affected north of 60,000 organizations, and the SolarWinds hack that compromised nine federal agencies late final yr — every of which had been particularly namedropped by the White House in a reality sheet accompanying the order.

The executive order outlines plenty of initiatives, together with lowering obstacles to data sharing between the federal government and the non-public sector, mandating the deployment of multi-factor authentication within the federal authorities, establishing a Cybersecurity Safety Review Board modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board, and making a standardized playbook for responding to “cyber incidents.” You can learn extra about the entire initiatives in the White House’s fact sheet here.

In the previous few months, we’ve seen instance after instance of main IT programs breaking down, whether or not they allowed for an enormous effort like the e-mail server hack from the state-sponsored Chinese hacking group Hafnium (the White House promised a “whole of government response” to that one), a ransomware attack that forced public schools to cancel classes, or perhaps a pair of breakdowns that seem to have allowed employees to remote into their local water supply and mess issues up. The insurance policies outlined in Wednesday’s executive order might create vital infrastructure to assist prevent future cybersecurity disasters — or, on the very least, higher restrict any potential fallout.