Before the State of the Union, President Obama outlined a legislative agenda that included bolstering the nation’s cybersecurity posture in both the public and private sector. To that end, the president’s proposed 2016 budget includes $14 billion to shore up the government’s cyber defenses.
More: Get the full story on the 2016 budget
“Cyber threats targeting the private sector, critical infrastructure and the federal government demonstrate that no sector, network or system is immune to infiltration by those seeking to steal commercial or government secrets,” the budget states. “The 2016 budget includes funding that will launch the nation on a path to hire the leading digital experts, institutionalize modern digital delivery practices and establish more effective partnerships both within government and with the private sector.”
The budget prioritizes the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, which is slated to roll out to a handful of agencies in 2015. The program focuses on creating real-time inventories of federal systems by agency — including who is on the network and what they are doing — and giving cybersecurity managers the tools to remediate any issues they find.
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More: CDM Phase II centers on monitoring user privileges, activities
The president’s 2016 proposal includes $582 million to scale CDM throughout all federal agencies.
As agencies get a better perspective of their networks and cyber posture, the administration will ramp up participation in the CyberStat review process, led by Homeland Security, along with OMB and the National Security Council. That process is set to begin this year and increase through 2016.
“In addition, the budget includes funding to enhance U.S. capabilities to respond to cyber threats and incidents once they have occurred, begin building a civilian cyber campus to better share information on cyber threats and incidents with those being targeted, improve the ability to share evidence of cyber crimes with other nations and maintain efforts to increase the nation’s cyber workforce,” the proposal states.
