Biden Meets with Amazon, Google, Microsoft CEOs on Cybersecurity at White House
Right, so the President essentially summoned every major tech CEO to the White House today to talk about cybersecurity. And they actually showed up, which tells you something about how serious this situation has become.
The Washington Post reports that Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella were all in attendance, along with JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and executives from major insurance, energy, and water companies.
“The reality is most of our critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, and the federal government can’t meet this challenge alone,” Biden said. “You have the power, capacity and responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity.”
CNBC notes this follows a string of devastating cyberattacks – SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, the JBS meat processing hack. The message from the administration is clear: fix this or we’ll regulate you into fixing it.
The commitments were substantial. According to the official White House fact sheet:
Microsoft pledged $20 billion over five years to integrate cybersecurity by design. Google promised $10 billion over five years for zero-trust programs and software supply chain security. Apple said it would create a program to drive security improvements across its supply chain, working with over 9,000 US suppliers.
Amazon announced it would offer its security awareness training to the public for free. IBM committed to training 150,000 people in cybersecurity over three years. The ongoing tech layoffs make the workforce training commitments particularly noteworthy.
The administration also noted there are roughly 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the country – hence the education commitments.
“Our skilled cybersecurity workforce is not growing fast enough to keep pace,” Biden acknowledged.
Whether these pledges translate into actual security improvements remains to be seen. But at least everyones now pretending to take this seriously.
