White House Will Hire Chief Information Security Officer

The White House is seeking to hire its first ever Chief Information Security Officer – this position is a must-have at many companies and local governments, but for some reason not at the federal level – even despite complaints from security experts and lawmakers. In the absence of such position, the US government has sometimes had problems with various agencies as it has sought to respond to the latest breach.

The government explained that the Chief Information Security Officer will focus on coordinating cyber security across federal agencies and will be housed within the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. It is also known that the position is expected to fill in 2 to 3 months. Apparently, the US government finally decided to place a greater priority on cyber security, even though the solution to this problem is simply putting someone person in charge of fixing it.

Actually, the government already has offices in charge of preventing hackers from breaching into government systems. For example, there are such positions as the special assistant to the president for cyber security, the DHS deputy undersecretary of homeland security and the information assurance directorate within the NSA.

According to White House representatives, the new federal Chief Information Security Officer exclusively will be in charge of improving computer security, so called "cyber hygine" including making sure that agencies patch computer security vulnerabilities and that government officials use two-factor verification to log into their working accounts. These measures might have prevented a hacker from recently breaking into a Department of Justice computer by tricking a government help desk into giving him a log in token.

“We’re still sort of understanding what happened there,” Michael Daniel, the current special assistant to the president for cybersecurity said on the press call.