President Obama holds cybersecurity huddle with CEOs

President Barack Obama huddled with the chief executives of Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and other top companies in a renewed bid to sell businesses on voluntary improvements to their digital defenses.

The meeting, held in the Situation Room, occurred as the Obama Administration continued working alongside Wall Street and the nation’s top power plants, water systems and other forms of critical infrastructure on baseline cybersecurity standards -- a program President Obama authorized through an executive order signed in February 2013 after Congress failed repeatedly to pass a law. The new White House program, however, is voluntary by nature, and its success or failure depends on businesses’ confidence in the final cybersecurity standards the administration produces. Work is far from finished, but President Obama himself certainly has become its early salesman in chief.

The President specifically tasked the National Institutes of Standards and Technology with developing a so-called Cybersecurity Framework, a draft unveiled by NIST. Those standards won’t be finalized until 2014, at which point the Department of Homeland Security will turn them into a voluntary program. Already, though, President Obama is trying to make the pitch to businesses. Republicans argued that the Democrats' cybersecurity bill would have imposed burdensome regulations on critical infrastructure companies, but Democrats worry that without mandatory regulations -- or at least strong incentives -- critical computer systems will be vulnerable to attack.