By the end of this week, there will be sweeping changes to the way the government handles highly sensitive information.
Politico reports that Barack Obama will issue an executive order on Friday that outlines a whole slew of enhancements to cyber security within departments like the FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon.
Some of them are very basic, seemingly obvious measures, like preventing employees from downloading private data onto removable hard drives.
Other implementations include better tracking of what government employees are doing when they access sensitive information. The Department of Defense’s chief information officer Teri Takai was quoted as saying, “It’s an additional tool to provide indicators that flag anomalous behavior, much as credit card companies monitor credit card use and a user’s profile.”
There’s also a set of back-end improvements on how information is encrypted and secured.
In addition, Obama will receive a report within 90 days on how the new measures are affecting data leaks.
This all comes as the result of a seven-month review of internal policies and procedures following the massive and unprecedented data fiasco from the website Wikileaks.
While the Wikileaks stories have lost a lot of their grandeur, the security holes they exposed were of the utmost importance and Obama hopes these new enhancements will prevent future leaks.
