Will Trump Act on Cybersecurity Safety?

If there ever was a time for cybersecurity, it very well could be now more than ever. 
On Tuesday (March 28), MIT experts released a report called “Keeping America Safe: Toward More Secure Networks for Critical Sectors,” which asks the Trump administration to improve the groundwork for cybersecurity.
The report, led by Joel Brenner, senior research at MIT and former head of us counterintelligence, includes the following recommendations:  improve coordination across the government; measure cyber risk and infrastructure fragility, and; review laws and regulations with a goal to reduce risk and optimize security investment.
According to CNN, Brenner said “it’s important to move controls for transportation, the electricity grid and gas pipelines off public networks.”
“A generation ago, these were all locked up in a room, and only the operating engineers could get into that room,” Brenner told the news organization. “Today, because we wanted to manage geographically dispersed equipment more cheaply and efficiently, we’ve hooked up all the controls to the internet.”

CNN also states that US presidents have been urging to strengthen infrastructure security for over 20 years.  The outlet quoted President George H.W. Bush saying in 1990 that,  “Telecommunications and information processing systems are highly susceptible to interception, unauthorized electronic access, and related forms of technical exploitation.”
President Barrack Obama was quoted saying in 2013, “the cyber threat to critical infrastructure continues to grow and represents one of the most serious national security challenges we must confront.”
Clearly, a strong threshold on the cybersecurity sector has been a long time coming–and very much needed.
But, you might ask, what is Trump doing?
In January, Trump initially postponed the signing of an executive order that would require government agencies to be more involved and manage “risks to networks under their control.”
Trump also said his plan will hold “Cabinet secretaries and agency heads accountable, totally accountable, for the cyber security of their organizations.”
“We must defend and protect federal networks,” he continued.
On that note, CNN further suggests that Trump should be signing an official order in the not too distant future. In fact, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a hearing to look at how to minimize hackings and evaluate infrastructure threats.
“We’ve been hearing for 25 years how important this is,” Brenner was quoted as saying. “And at the same time, we’ve been walking backwards on cybersecurity.”
Of course, laws take time before they go into effect, and there’s plenty to consider in the report before decisions are made. In the meantime, keep being patient, investors.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Jocelyn Aspa, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.