The Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration in the US has issued a new cybersecurity strategy that puts the onus on Big Tech companies in preventing cyber attacks.
The National Cybersecurity Strategy stressed on rebalancing the responsibility to defend cyberspace by “shifting the burden for cybersecurity away from individuals, small businesses, and local governments, and onto the organisations that are most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us”.
The strategy also singled out China as “the broadest, most active, and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks.”
The strategy said that we must realign incentives to favour long-term investments by “striking a careful balance between defending ourselves against urgent threats today and simultaneously strategically planning for and investing in a resilient future”.
It said that while using all instruments of national power, “we will make malicious cyber actors incapable of threatening the national security or public safety of the United States” and address ransomware threat through a comprehensive Federal approach and in “lockstep with our international partners”.
The country will place responsibility on those within its digital ecosystem that are best positioned to reduce risk and shift the consequences of poor cybersecurity away from the most vulnerable “in order to make our digital ecosystem more trustworthy”.
The US has lately seen several nation-state cyber attacks on its industry and government institutions, especially from China-backed bad actors.
The US “seeks a world where responsible state behaviour in cyberspace is expected and reinforced and where irresponsible behaviour is isolating and costly”.
