Cyberprotection plan is set for summer release

• By Susan M. Menke
• May 03, 1999

The Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office expects to have a national plan to thwart
cyberterrorism ready by summer.

Darwyn Banks, CIAO program coordinator at the Commerce Department, said National Plan
1.0 will have government and private-sector infrastructure components but will be
nonregulatory.

The federal government does not own the infrastructure of transportation, finance,
energy or emergency response services, he said. Banks and Tom Burke, the Federal
Technology Service’s assistant commissioner for information security, spoke last week
at the Fed Web ’99 conference in Bethesda, Md.

With a fiscal 2000 budget of $1.4 billion, mostly for research into secure operating
systems, artificial intelligence and user profiling, CIAO will move forward to fully
implement by 2003 the Presidential Decision Directive 63 against cyberthreats, Banks said.

The national plan weaves together seven separate programs:

Burke said the first 13 departments and agencies have completed their second round of
planning [GCN, Oct. 19, 1998, Page 3], and a
second group of eight is going into the second round after being evaluated.

Burke, the executive agent for Presidential Decision Directive 63, said the 13
agencies’ self-protection plans “had some shortcomings, but we didn’t
expect them to be complete. They will work on them through time. We aren’t giving out
grades as with Y2K.”