As hard as it is to believe, for most of the Bush and Obama administrations, the government’s approach to cyber attacks has largely been an ad-hoc process. In that time, the IRS was breached and lost 700,000 records and foreign intelligence hacking has become so commonplace that the FBI put several Chinese military personnel on their most wanted list. Even political parties aren’t safe, as the DNC email leak is increasingly believed to be an attempt on the part of the Russian government to meddle in the U.S. presidential elections. And now, finally, the White House has a plan to deal with cyber attacks.
The new presidential policy directive is much like what happens when a hurricane strikes or a terrorist attack occurs. Agents from several branches of government, including the FBI, NSA, and CIA, get together, quickly assess the overall severity, and then develop a plan of action to deal with the hack and its effects. They even have a color-coding system!
As you can see, it’s mostly graded on real-world effects. So minor annoyances like crashed websites or Pokémon Go servers not working aren’t something they’d bother with, but massive heists of Social Security numbers or theft of sensitive government information, they would. This has been a long time coming, and will, if nothing else, coordinate and speed up federal response. Besides, considering the names of some of these groups, we can’t wait to see a government spokesman speak seriously about a “Code Green incident” caused by “Fancy Bear.”
(Via Gizmodo)