US cyber security is top of the agenda

Barack Obama made an initial review of US cyber security, but pressure is growing for the president to take further action For the past month or so a curious game has been going on in the world of rumour and uncertainty that passes for the intelligence community. At the heart of it is an attempt to force the US president, Barack Obama, to put cyber security back to the top of his agenda and to usher in increased monitoring of the internet. Despite an initial promise of action and a demand for a report on the risks to the US technology infrastructure to be on his desk in 60 days, little in policy terms has been heard since. Even more frustratingly for the computer-security community, Obama has also not filled the much-trumpeted post of cyber czar . Melissa Hathaway, the White House's senior acting director for cyberspace and the author of Obama's 60-day review of cyber policy , had been widely tipped for the position – but four months ago she resigned , citing personal reasons for her decision. Damage limitation This appears to have resulted in a turf war between the US department of homeland security, the military and the intelligence community as each compete for responsibility for the issue. Now, in what is being seen as an attempt to jog Obama's memory, stories about the US's vulnerability to cyber attack , the threat it poses to its economy and the potential rise of cyber-terrorism have begun to appear on an almost daily basis. Senior intelligence officials are suggesting that the US faces a massive risk to its power grid and communications infrastructure – claiming that if current vulnerabilities are exploited there would be enormous economic damage to the US. "There has been a heightened awareness of our vulnerability to cyber attacks in the US and that has been building for over a year. People are saying, 'Look at Lehman Brothers' – if someone had taken out another banking website on the same day it would have been the straw that broke the camel's back," says Tom Reilly, a US director of ArcSight, a company set up by the investment arm of the CIA. It draws 30% of its revenue from monitoring critical infrastructure for dangerous activity for US federal government agencies and Nato. On the subject of the cyber czar, Reilly says: "There is now a lot of impatience … People are looking for an individual to be appointed to set policy direction, and without that framework in place there is the possibility of duplication by agencies." The potential for exploiting the fragile confidence in financial institutions has not been lost on businesses. "The recession has been a driver in awareness," says William Beer, director of information security practice for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "For the first time, critical infrastructure vulnerability has made it onto the risk register

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US cyber security is top of the agenda