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The US government is seeking help from technology companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google, to bolster the country’s critical infrastructure defenses against cyber threats after a series of high-profile attacks.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officially unveiled the initiative, called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, on Thursday. The effort will initially focus on combating ransomware and cyber attacks against cloud providers, said Jen Easterly, director of the agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Ultimately, she said, it aims to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector.
“It will bring people together in a unique way in peacetime, so that we can plan how we are going to react in times of war,” she said in an interview. Ms. Easterly was sworn in as director of CISA last month. She was previously head of counterterrorism at the Obama White House and commander of the Army’s first cyber operations unit at the National Security Agency, the US cyberespionage agency.
Over the past year, ransomware attacks have disrupted much of daily life in the United States.
Following a ransomware attack last month against cloud service provider Kaseya Ltd., President Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States will take “whatever steps are necessary” to protect its infrastructure against such threats. incidents. Days later, the administration blamed hackers affiliated with China’s State Security Ministry for a separate set of attacks against users of Microsoft Exchange Server software.
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