Trump announces plans for Cyber Review Team

In a speech to a veterans group, the Republican presidential nominee offered an outline for his cybersecurity policy.

Photo credit: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com
 

After calling the security aspect of cyber "hardly doable" during the first presidential debate, the Republican presidential nominee took another whack at addressing cybersecurity during an Oct. 3 campaign event.

At a Retired American Warriors town hall in Herndon, Va., Donald Trump vowed that improving national cybersecurity "will be an immediate and top priority for my administration" if elected.

"Today is just the beginning of a long and overdue national discussion of how to protect ourselves from modern cyber-crime and evolving national security threats, and how to develop the cyber offense strategies necessary to gain a critical security edge in the 21st century," he said.

Trump plans to tackle the issue with a "cyber review team" made up of military, civilian and private sector experts to examine the vulnerability of government systems. The team "will proceed with the most sensitive systems first, but ultimately all systems will be analyzed and made as secure as modern technology permits," the GOP nominee said.

The plan also calls for regular follow-up reviews, and "exact recommendations for the best combination of defensive technologies tailored to specific agencies," including insider threat monitoring and penetration testing.

Trump cited the hack of "at least 20 million identities of people who underwent FBI background checks," seemingly a reference to the 2014 breach of the Office of Personnel Management, as a chance to go after the cybersecurity policies under President Barack Obama.

"The fact that this highly classified information was so poorly protected demonstrates that cybersecurity is just one more area where the Obama Administration has failed," he said.

Prior to these remarks, Trump had not ventured much into the area of technology policy.

The Republican candidate also used the cyber section of his talk to go after his opponent.

"Hillary Clinton's only experience in cybersecurity involves her criminal scheme to violate federal law, engineering a massive cover-up, and putting the entire nation in harm's way," he said, referring to Clinton's use of a private email server.

Trump also denounced the "constant" and "enormous" cybersecurity problem posed by China, Russia, North Korea, terrorists and organized crime.

"Cyber theft is the fastest-growing crime in the United States," he said. "Attacks like these are happening on a regular basis both in the United States and around the world."