White House pledges to stay on top of cybersecurity

There are some naysayers who believe that President Obama's pledge to make cybersecurity a top priority is all talk, and that the report issued in late May outlining the problems is likely to gather dust on some White House shelf just like efforts of previous administration.

That view was strongly countered this week by Christopher Painter, cybersecurity director at the National Security Council. He said the administration has a list of goals, and intends to follow through to protect the federal computer networks from malicious attacks.

"It's not the report, it's where we go after the report," Painter said during a speech at the Gartner Information Security Summit at National Harbor, MD. " Painter said the report sets out many "ambitious things we need to get done, but we need to get them done now."

Still, there remains skepticism in the IT community. Gary McGraw, CTO at software security and quality consulting firm Cigital, said past administrations have issued cybersecurity reports with little improvement.

"We're very good at putting out these reasonable pieces of review," he said. "We're not very good at actualizing those, turning them into action, actually doing something."

For more on the administration's cybersecurity plans:
- see this Computerworld article