Business leaders in sectors ranging from technology to insurance pledged billions of dollars to bolster cybersecurity efforts at a White House meeting with President Biden on Wednesday.
The meeting comes as a result of several high-profile cyberattacks, including government software contractors SolarWinds and the Colonial Pipeline pipeline, which have brought additional urgency to these security issues.
Commitments range from working toward new industry standards to providing other companies with stronger security tools and providing skills training to workers to cover the approximately 500,000 uncovered U.S. cybersecurity jobs. Biden recently signed an executive order forcing U.S. agencies to use two-factor authentication to log in, which can help prevent cyberattacks.
The White House said Apple will create a program dedicated to making security improvements to its technology supply chains, which will include working with vendors to adopt multifactor authentication and security training.
Google said it would invest more than $ 10 billion over five years to strengthen cybersecurity and pledged to train 100,000 Americans in technical fields such as IT support and data analytics through its certificate program. career. Google’s financial commitment will be used to strengthen the software supply chain and open source security, among other things.
Microsoft has pledged $ 20 billion over five years to offer more advanced security tools, Satya Nadella CEO said on Twitter. He added that Microsoft would invest $ 150 million to help government agencies improve their security systems and expand cybersecurity training partnerships. Microsoft has spent $ 1 billion a year on cybersecurity since 2015.
IBM said it would train more than 150,000 people in cybersecurity skills in three years, while partnering with Historically Black Universities and Colleges to help diversify the workforce. The company also announced a new data storage solution for critical infrastructure companies and said it is working to create secure encryption methods for quantum computing.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told CNBC on Wednesday before the meeting and outside the White House that cybersecurity is “the topic of the decade.” He said he hoped to see more coordination between the public and private sectors coming out of the meeting and said IBM will do its part to help skilled workers in the space.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing division, plans to offer account holders free multi-factor authentication devices to better protect their data. It also plans to offer “safety awareness training” to organizations and individuals.
A spokesman for financial services company TIAA noted several ongoing initiatives that have been taken to train more workers in cybersecurity. These include a partnership with New York University that allows TIAA associates to pursue a fully reimbursed master’s degree in cyberinformation.
Leaving the White House, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called the meeting “a very productive collaborative debate.”
“We hope we continue to follow up and do a good job of protecting our country from a really complex problem,” he said.
Satya Nadella, executive director of Microsoft, said the event “brought together the right people to have a good discussion.”
Two water executives who came out of the meeting told CNBC that the debate emphasized cross-sector collaboration. U.S. Water CEO Walter Lynch said there was an “understanding that we must work together to address the cyber threats facing the country.”
-Mary Catherine Wellons of CNBC and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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SEE: Colonial Pipeline hackers reportedly obtained $ 90 million in bitcoins before closing them