The President’s National Cybersecurity Plan: What You Need to Know

President Barack Obama has worked for more than seven years to aggressively and comprehensively confront the challenge of malicious cyber activity. So Feb 9, he is directing the Administration to implement a Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP) -- the capstone of our national cybersecurity efforts. CNAP puts in place a long-term strategy to ensure the federal government, the private sector, and American citizens can take better control of our digital security. Here’s a brief look at what it does:

• Establishes a Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity that will bring top strategic, business, and technical thinkers from outside the government to make critical recommendations on how we can use new technical solutions and best practices to protect our privacy and public safety.
• Transforms how the government will manage cybersecurity through the proposal of a $3.1 billion Information Technology Modernization Fund and a new Federal Chief Information Security Officer to help retire, replace, and modernize legacy IT across the government.
• Empowers Americans to secure their online accounts by using additional security tools – like multi-factor authentication and other identity processing steps – and by working with Google, Facebook, DropBox, Microsoft, Visa, PayPal, and Venmo to secure online accounts and financial transactions.
• Invests more than $19 billion for cybersecurity as part of the President’s budget – a more than 35 percent increase from 2015’s request to secure our nation in the future.