Biden signs order to protect US networks from foreign hackers

US President Joe Biden will sign an executive order on Thursday that is his final attempt to bolster US cyber defenses following a series of damaging cyberattacks on federal networks that US officials have blamed on actors from China and the United States. Russia.

The decision is the product of a months-long analysis by U.S. officials of key hacking operations that took place during the Biden administration, from Russia’s alleged disruption of a satellite provider before the invasion of Ukraine, to the alleged infiltration of China into US telecommunications networks to spy on top Republican and Democratic politicians.

The goal is to “put the new administration and the country on a path to continued success” and “make it more costly and difficult for China, Russia, Iran and ransomware criminals to hack,” said Anne Neuberger, a senior White House official. , told reporters on Wednesday (15).

The order will task agencies with using stronger encryption to protect federal employees’ calls and text messages from interception, according to a draft reviewed by the CNN . This is a nod to the Chinese telecommunications hack, which attacked targets who used insecure messages. The instruction also gives the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency more power to collect critical data from other agencies’ networks to investigate sophisticated hacking operations and makes it easier for the Treasury Department to sanction cybercriminals or spies who disrupt critical U.S. infrastructure.

The executive order also calls for new programs to try to reduce the billions of dollars in identity fraud that has affected Americans and to use artificial intelligence to protect the American energy sector from hacks.

The order reflects Biden administration officials’ long-standing frustration with lax security practices at software companies that sell their products to the U.S. government. A government-backed review of Microsoft’s security practices, for example, found a “cascade” of “preventable errors” that allowed another group of Chinese hackers to breach the tech giant’s network and, later, email accounts. mail from senior US officials in 2023.

Microsoft has since announced reforms to its security policies.

In his first months in office, Biden issued another cybersecurity order that required contractors to meet a minimum set of security standards to do business with the government. But Thursday’s directive is finally requiring these contractors to provide the government and the public with data showing that their software meets secure development requirements. Federal agencies will post the receipts online for the public to see, according to the order.

“We weren’t validating that the products we were using were actually conveying to us that they were meeting that safety standard,” Neuberger said.

Cybersecurity has traditionally been a bipartisan issue. It remains unclear to what extent Trump’s new team taking office next week will maintain or discard the executive order. Trump’s new national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has called for more offensive cyber operations, but the incoming administration has not defined strategies for cyber defense.

This content was originally published in Biden signs order to protect US networks against foreign hackers on the CNN Brasil website.

Source: CNN Brasil

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