The Next President Will Face a Cyber Crisis. Here's How to Handle It

The next US president will face a cyber landscape of unparalleled complexity with little time or flexibility to bring it under control. Here are five high-level priorities that experts and former federal officials say should guide the next president.

Build a Real Cyber Strategy: Ideally, the next president should develop a series of big-picture cyber priorities clear enough the average citizen could predict his or her responses to some new challenge as reliably as she could to a new environmental challenge.
Create Playbooks: Even the best policy won’t provide perfect guidance for every situation, especially because cybersecurity, by its very nature, is bound up in numerous other issues ranging from national security and economic security to personal privacy and online innovation.
Build Cyber Norms: The government has endorsed a handful of norms for how nations ought to act in cyberspace, including several promulgated by a United Nations group of government experts. The scope of cyber threats has shifted so rapidly, however, the U.S. often seems to be left deciding what’s out of bounds after it’s happened rather than before.
Choose Priorities: One thing that’s delayed progress in defensive cybersecurity has been taking on too much at once.
Shift Focus to the Private Sector: Finally, the next president should figure out ways to better incentivize the private sector to improve its own security.