NEW YORK CITY — Vice President Mike Pence blamed former President Barack Obama Tuesday for failing to safeguard America’s cyber infrastructure and leaving President Trump to clean up the mess.
“We inherited a cyber-crisis,” Pence told private sector chief executives at the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber summit Tuesday evening. “The previous administration all but neglected cybersecurity, even though the digital threats were growing more numerous and more dangerous by the day.”
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Pence revealed that in 2014, a foreign government had hacked into the White House network.
The federal government is the victim of hundreds of thousands of digital attacks on a daily basis. The number of cyberattacks on nongovernment entities is impossible to track, Pence said.
“And yet, in the face of constant attacks like this, all too often, the last administration chose silence and paralysis over strength and action,” he added.
DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced Tuesday morning that the department had created an office to focus solely on bridging the gap between the private sector and government in preventing and responding to cyberattacks.
The National Risk Management Center will serve as the liaison between both sectors and be the first point of contact for banks, energy companies, and other critical infrastructure entities who detect an attack on their systems.
The new office is also meant to connect both worlds so that the government understands incoming threats against U.S. enterprise.
