White House Will Work With Big Tech On New Cybersecurity Guidelines

The US government on Wednesday said it would work with industry to hammer out new guidelines to improve the security of the technology supply chain, as 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, the finance industry and infrastructure companies said they would do more about the growing threat of cyber attacks to the US economy, reported Reuters. 

“The federal government can’t meet this challenge alone,” Biden told the masked executives in the East Room, telling them, “You have the power, the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity.”

After the meeting, the White House said the National Institute of Standards and Technology  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, Google, Travelers, and Coalition, a cyber insurance provider, 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 (SWI.N), the Colonial Pipeline company, meat processing company JBS and software firm Kaseya. The attacks hurt the United States far beyond just the companies hacked, affecting fuel and food supplies. read more

“We have a lot of work to do,” Biden said, citing both ransomware attacks and his push to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold Russian-based cyber gangs responsible, and the need to fill nearly half a million public and private cybersecurity jobs.

The guest list included Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google’s parent Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai and IBM, Chief Executive Arvind Krishna.

After the meeting, Amazon said it would make its cybersecurity training available to the public for free, and it would give multi-factor authentication devices to some cloud computing customers, starting in October.

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