The Senate chose Chris Inglis as the first cybersecurity director for the White House by gaining a unanimous consent vote which means none of the lawmakers objected to the decision. The decision to appoint the first cybersecurity director comes a day after the high-profile meeting of president Biden with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The appointment of the first cybersecurity director indicates the growing concerns of the Biden administration over the recent cyber ransomware attacks on the infrastructure of the United States of America.
Chris Inglis served as the Deputy Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). Inglis will be serving as the National Cyber Director, a newly formulated agency through the recent National Defense Authorization Act. President Joe Biden signed the legislation while proposing a budget of $15 million for the office, the office budget has yet to get approval from congress.
Cyberattacks had been on a rise since the world became a global village of information but the recent attacks on the USA’s infrastructural units such as the oil and gas pipelines, transportation hubs, and then the cyber ware ransom attack on the JBS beef plants have risen the concerns of the federal government to pass legislation immediately to combat this growing culture of cyber-attack ransomware.
Biden signed an exclusive executive order to bolster and furnish the cyber defenses which had been under immense pressure to respond to cyberattack aimed at countries like Russia, North Korea, China, or Iran.
In 2020, the infamous SolarWinds hack compromised almost 200 organizations across the world which were exploited through the software of VMware, SolarWinds, and Microsoft. The United States intelligence believes that Russia was after the SolarWinds cyberattack.
President Biden presented a list of 16 entities that are supposed to be off-limits of the cyber-attack. Gen. Jack Leanne stated that America has all the formidable capability to respond to the cyberattacks but it never responded to the consequences to any degree – giving the reference to the SolarWinds attack.
Chris Inglis had previously emphasized the need from the government to protect the private sector from the growing ransomware culture. He had stated that “private states conduct critical activities which are for the nation’s interests, it may well be needed to step in and regulate or mandate the same way as the aviation or the automobile industry was done”
