The White House on Tuesday announced the creation of a federal agency to analyze threats to the nation's cybersecurity and coordinate strategy to combat them.
The Obama administration is launching the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center as a place to coordinate cyberthreat intelligence from the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. The center will operate under the guidance of the director of national intelligence.
Currently, no single government agency is responsible for coordinating cyberthreat assessments, sharing information rapidly among existing agencies and providing timely intelligence to policymakers, said Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism.
The announcement came in the wake of high-profile hack attacks against Sony Pictures Entertainment, Anthem Insurance, Target, Home Depot, eBay and JPMorgan Chase. The federal government also has suffered cyberattacks, including the hacking of unclassified computers at the White House and State Department and the hacking of the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the U.S. central military command.
Several of the attacks have been blamed on hackers in Russia, China and North Korea.