In an arguably long-overdue move, the Obama administration will appoint someone to ‘focus on coordinating cybersecurity across federal agencies’

The Kellogg cereal company, the state of Colorado and Cook County, Illinois, all have someone in charge of keeping the hackers out.

In 2016, the US government will too.

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On Tuesday, the White House is expected to announce that it is seeking to hire its first chief information security officer, a role filled at many companies and local governments but one that has long been absent at the federal level, despite complaints from security experts and lawmakers. In its absence, the government has sometimes struggled to coordinate a jumble of three-letter agencies as it has sought to respond to the latest breach. (See: Office of Personnel Management, 2013 and 2014. Or State Department email system, 2014. Or a Department of Justice computer system, this week.)

It’s arguably a long overdue step for the Obama administration as it has pushed private companies to beef up their own defenses. The role, which the government said it expects to fill in two to three months, will focus on coordinating cybersecurity across federal agencies and will be housed within the Office of Management and Budget at the White House.

The move shows how the government is increasingly placing a greater priority on cybersecurity in the Data Breach Age. But it also illustrates that, in Washington, the solution to any problem is to put another person in charge of fixing it.

For instance, the government already has several offices in charge of making sure hackers stay out of government systems. There’s the special assistant to the president for cybersecurity, the Department of Homeland Security’s deputy undersecretary of homeland security and, yet still, the information assurance directorate within the National Security Agency.

White House officials said the new federal CISO exclusively will be in charge of making sure government workers do basic things to improve computer security. So-called “cyber hygiene” includes decidedly unsexy things like making sure agencies patch computer security flaws and that government users employ two-factor verification to log into government accounts.

Such steps might have prevented a hacker from recently breaking into a DoJ computer by tricking a government help desk into giving him a log in token.

“We’re still sort of understanding what happened there,” Michael Daniel, the current special assistant to the president for cybersecurity said on the press call.