Trump gives $1.9bn to cyber security

Donald Trump's first budget as US president puts forward US$1.5 billion (A$1.9 billion) for cyber security to protect the country's federal government and critical infrastructure.

The sum is to be allotted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the agency with responsibility for public security, Trump revealed late last week in a budget blueprint entitled America First - A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.

The budget intends to allow the DHS to share more threat intelligence with federal agencies and the private sector “through a suite of advanced cyber security tools and more assertive defense of government networks”.

Homeland security advisor Tom Bossert said departments would be held accountable for their own cyber security under the new budget.

Included in the budget are a number of promises to strengthen the cyber security of government departments.

The Department of the Treasury, for example, will invest “in a department-wide plan to strategically enhance existing security systems and pre-empt fragmentation of information technology management across the bureaus, positioning Treasury to anticipate and nimbly respond in the event of a cyber attack".

NASA, the US armed forces, and the Department of Justice are also due to have their cyber security capabilities strengthened.

Trump promised to harden the nation's defences in cyber space while campaigning for the presidency, and has been disparaging about the state of US preparedness in the face of cyber threats.

“We're so obsolete in cyber. We're the ones that sort of were very much involved with the creation, but we're so obsolete, we just seem to be toyed with by so many different countries," he told the New York Times last year.

A recently released report by the US Defense Science Board, commissioned under the Obama administration, expresses concern about North Korea attacks against the US electrical grid. Included in the budget is a promise to help “harden and evolve critical grid infrastructure that the American people and the economy rely upon”.

The US federal government has been the subject of a number of large breaches that exposed the information of federal employees to the public.

The most infamous is the 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach, which saw the detailed personal information of an estimated 21.5 million people, many of whom were government employees, stolen by attackers.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com