Obama wants YOU for US CyberCorps!

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President Barack Obama’s administration released the presidential Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP) this week. CNAP is an attempt to fix the broken federal information security system by a set of executive actions and budget requests. In essence, the idea is to increase efforts to protect citizens’ privacy and the security of US infrastructure and businesses from hostile elements such as criminals, terrorists, and other. To do this, CNAP calls for creating a commission to figure out how exactly to accomplish the task at hand.

US Federal information security is horribly outdated and antiquated. CNAP hopes to remedy the situation by injecting money into vital efforts to modernise information security systems at agencies like the Social Security Administration, that still “uses systems and code from the 1960s. No successful business could operate this way,” Obama wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

To accomplish this, the White House is seeking more than $19 billion spread across the 2017 budget. The administration is already making moves and allocating monies: $3.1 billion is going to an Information Technology Modernisation Fund and to fund a new Federal Chief Information Security Officer.

To function truly effectively, the new Federal CISO will require a whole army of dedicated and knowledgeable federal employees to replace the fleet of contractors the government relied upon until now. Buried deep in the total 19$ billion spending is a provision for a CyberCorps Reserve programme: a scholarship for cyber-warriors.

Some $62 million are earmarked “for Americans who wish to obtain cybersecurity education and serve their country in the civilian Federal government.” Students will be able to get scholarships for undergraduate cybersecurity studies in exchange for agreeing to work for the federal government for a period equal to the length of the scholarship.

For those already possessing degrees, there’s still an attractive proviso: come work under the new scheme, and all federal student loans will be forgiven.