Clinton pushes security

Clinton memo

President Clinton on Friday reiterated his plea to agencies to protect their

information systems against cyberattacks like the ones that shut down several

popular Internet commerce sites last month.

In a memo, Clinton said White House Chief of Staff John Podesta will coordinate

a governmentwide review of agency actions and vulnerabilities, and report

the findings to Clinton by April 1.

Clinton also highlighted the work administration officials have done during

the past month with industry to secure private-sector systems against the

denial-of-service attacks that shut down Yahoo, eBay and several other sites,

and emphasized that the government must do the same for its own systems.

He said agencies should work with the Federal Computer Incident Response

Center and the National Infrastructure Protection Center to install protective

tools and patches.

Agencies should also, "within legal and administrative limits," look at

the security measures being taken by the contractors providing services

to their agency, Clinton said.