Following the recommendations detailed in the Obama Administration’s Cyberspace Policy Review plan, a gaggle of federal agencies including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security have established a new portal to collect and share creative ideas for fighting cybercrime at home and abroad.
A portal might seem to be a rather obvious and small first step at this stage in the game, government officials are hoping it will go a long way toward helping all these government agencies understand the magnitude of the cybercrime threats they’re facing and how to best budget their soon-to-be-expanding resources.
As eSecurity Planet reports, the idea is to generate an atmosphere of collaboration that was found seriously lacking in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The portal provides a one-stop site for all these disparate agencies to solicit desperately needed input from experts outside the Beltway, including those at private sector technology firms and major colleges and universities.
A group of federal agencies opened an online forum to collect ideas from the public for what it is billing as its “game-change” cybersecurity initiative, calling for proposals for R&D projects as it continues its efforts to leverage government heft to shore up public and private information networks.
“I want to really emphasize that we want everyone to be thinking big, thinking novel,” Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation’s Computer Science and Information Assurance Directorate, said at an event Wednesday launching the initiative.
“The administration is very, very keen to see how the government can be working with the private sector on this along with academia,” she said.