On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed an executive order implementing new policies to improve national cybersecurity.
The executive order outlines a number of initiatives, including reducing barriers to information sharing between the government and the private sector, mandating the deployment of multi-factor authentication in the federal government, establishing a Cybersecurity Safety Review Board modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board, and creating a standardized playbook for responding to cyber incidents.
To know more about all the initiatives in the White House’s fact sheet here.
The executive order comes after a number of recent cyber attacks. Last week the Colonial Pipeline was shut because of a ransomware attack, the Microsoft Exchange server vulnerabilities that may have affected north of 60,000 organizations, and the SolarWinds hack that compromised nine federal agencies late last year — each of which were specifically specified by the White House in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
