Biden Signs Executive Order To Bolster US Cyber Defences

President Joe Biden has how signed another executive order in the final few days of his presidency before handing over power to the incoming Trump administration.

The White House announced that President Biden Wednesday had signed a new executive order to strengthen the nation’s cybersecurity, and make it easier to pursue foreign adversaries or hacking groups that try to compromise American systems.

The executive order on cybersecurity had been expected last week, but had been delayed as experts suggested the Biden team might be trying to make it more acceptable to the incoming administration.

Earlier in the week President Biden had also signed an executive order to reduce bottlenecks to connect AI data centres to clean energy sources, by leasing out federal sites for energy infrastructure projects.

Executive order: Cybersecurity

The White House stated that the “United States stands alone among major economies in lacking secure, privacy-preserving digital identity infrastructure, leaving Americans exposed to a wave of cybercrime.”

In order to count this, the executive order contains the following measures:

• Improving sanctions: the executive order improves the US government ability to use sanctions to punish cyber attackers.
• Securing software: the executive order now requires software vendors and contractors to the US Government to provide proof that they are using secure development practices to develop software; implement federal initiatives to validate those proofs and publish the validation results; require the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop guidance for how to securely and reliably deploy software updates; and require the General Services Administration (GSA) to develop policy driving cloud companies to clearly spell out how customers can secure their use of cloud products.
• Reducing fraud, reducing cybercrime: the executive order promotes privacy-preserving digital identity documents, like mobile drivers licenses, and verification systems; and launches an early-warning fraud pilot to alert Americans of potential fraudulent claims of their public benefits and payments.
• Bolstering cybersecurity with AI: the executive order accelerates the development and use of AI for cyber defence, by launching public/private partnership to use AI for cyber defence of critical infrastructure in the energy sector; and directing research and development of AI-based cybersecurity tools and techniques.

Other measures included in the cybersecurity executive order include directing the federal government to reduce bureaucracy and waste in government cybersecurity; launching a cyber trust mark to give Americans an easy way to see whether consumer products (baby monitors and home security systems etc) are cybersecure; ordering federal agencies to implement centralised visibility and threat hunting, to quickly identify and mitigate threats across all Federal networks; bolstering the cybersecurity capabilities of space-based systems; and finally promoting the adoption of post-quantum technologies and securing American systems against quantum systems from hostile nation states.

The policies build on several earlier actions by the Biden administration intended to boost defenses against cyber intrusions — whether they target the government, critical infrastructure like ports or power plants, U.S. businesses or individual users.

Signing out

“It has been the privilege of my life to serve this nation for over 50 years,” wrote President Biden in a document highlighting the track record of the Biden-Harris Administration.

“Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as President of the United States.”

“I have given my heart and my soul to our nation,” he added. “And I have been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people.”

“The idea of America lies in your hands,” President Biden wrote. “We just have to keep the faith and remember who we are. We are the United States of America, and there is simply nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together. Thank you.”