Trump Extends Obama Executive Order On Cyberattacks (infoworld.com)

"U.S. President Donald Trump is extending by one year special powers introduced by former President Barack Obama that allow the government to issue sanctions against people and organizations engaged in significant cyberattacks and cybercrime against the U.S.," according to InfoWorld. An anonymous reader quotes their report: Executive Order 13694 was introduced on April 1, 2015, and was due to expire on Saturday, but the president sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday evening informing it of his plans to keep it active. Significant malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," Trump wrote in the letter. "Therefore, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13694 with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities."

The executive order gave the U.S. new powers to retaliate for hacking of critical infrastructure, major denial of service attacks or large scale economic hacking. It was expanded in December 2016 to include election-related systems and used to sanction Russian agents and organizations for their alleged role in a series of attacks during the presidential election.

Comments

Re:Obama backstabs us again

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got bad news for you if you think they couldn't spy on you until this executive order came along

"Flagged"?

[wonkey_monkey]

Trump Extends Obama Executive Order On Cyberattacks [Flagged]

What?

Re:Not an April Fool Joke?

[chipschap]

Actually now I'm waiting to hear why something that was good when Obama did it is now bad when Trump does the exact same thing.

I'm sure I won't have to wait for long.

Re:Because Trump is NOT a capitalist

[chipschap]

Actually my comment was quite sincere and not trolling. Now, I did NOT vote for Trump nor did I support him. Neither do I hate him; I try not to hate anyone.

My intent was simply to point out that at least as I see it, Obama got rather gentle treatment from the public and the press. (I am not making a judgment as to whether that was or was not warranted.) Trump gets very harsh treatment from (much of) the public and the press. (Again, no judgment as to justification.)

What happens, though, is that objectivity is lost. Everything Obama did is "good." Everything Trump does is "bad." Even if they are one and the same thing.

Re:Because Trump is NOT a capitalist

[shanen]

Now I'm about 75% convinced that you're a troll. There really is an objective reality and it matters.

Perhaps I'm too tepid a "supporter", but I have never met a supporter of President Obama who thought that everything he did was good.

Perhaps I'm too tepid an "opponent" of #PresidentTweety, but I have only seen a couple of Trump's actions that were good. Unfortunately most of them were in the category of "Apple pie tastes good." In general, the Donald's grip on such crucial realities as climate change is quite weak, but the sad part to me is that he isn't actually putting ideology ahead of reality. I've concluded that he just doesn't care. Never had to, and isn't about to start now.

Re:Not an April Fool Joke?

[rtb61]

You would think they would at least do an addedum to exclude spoofed or false flag attacks. So apparently this is a new trade scam and corporate competition scam. Having trouble with a foriegn competitor no problem pay a NSA or CIA contractor and they will launch an attack to mimic you competitors and then incompetent FBI will blame them and pet politicians can then sanction them, new US business practice.

I can image the US sanction the entire rest of the world, country by country and company by company, and then wonder why no one wants to trade with them and don't want their funny money made up dollars.