White House officials, including deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger, are meeting with executives from Big Tech firms on Thursday (Jan. 13) to talk about major cyberattacks on the country last year that involved open-source software Log4j and other software, according to Reuters and other news outlets.
Executives from Google, Apple and Amazon will be in attendance, along with leaders from IBM, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle. Government agencies attending will include the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and the Commerce Department.
The Biden administration made cybersecurity a major priority after multiple cyberattacks in 2021 exposed government agency records and those held by many companies. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote to tech firm CEOs in December 2021 after a security weakness was uncovered in Log4j, open-source software that organizations worldwide use to log data in their applications.
See also: Log4j Vulnerability Causes Nearly 900K Cyberattacks in Four Days
Sullivan pointed out in the letter that open-source software is a “key national security concern” since it’s maintained by volunteers and users can study, change and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.
The virtual meeting will go over concerns surrounding the security of open-source software and what can be done to improve it, according to a White House statement.
While Log4j is one concern up for discussion, the meeting was also prompted by last year’s SolarWinds breach, thought to have been initiated by Russia. The attack gave hackers access to the emails of government officials at several departments and vendor information. There also was a 2020 attack on the U.S. Treasury Department.
Read more: Microsoft: Foreign Governments Backing Log4j Hackers
President Biden issued an executive order last year to launch a review board along with new software guidelines for government agencies due to the growing frequency of cyberattacks, according to reports.
The meeting will target “what has worked and what else can be done to secure the open-source software that we all fundamentally rely on,” a senior administration official told reporters.
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