Today, the Obama administration released the president's Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP), a set of executive actions and budget requests that seeks to fix federal agencies' information security woes. The plan aims to spur broader efforts to protect citizens' privacy and the security of the nation's businesses and infrastructure from criminals and other threats. And it starts off by creating a commission to figure out how to do that.

The Federal government's information security posture, as demonstrated by the Office of Personnel Management breach last year, is at best antiquated and at worst horrific in its inadequacy. The CNAP looks to rapidly infuse money into efforts to modernize the decrepit information security systems at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, which as President Obama wrote in an op-ed piece published today by the Wall Street Journal, "uses systems and code from the 1960s. No successful business could operate this way.”

To make the fixes, the Obama administration is asking for over $19 billion in spending scattered across the proposed 2017 budget and is making a number of immediate moves that require funding now—$3.1 billion for an Information Technology Modernization Fund and to pay a new Federal Chief Information Security Officer (with a salary of between $123,175 and $185,100 a year, Top Secret/SCI clearance required—apply by February 26 if interested).

But getting anything directed by a new Federal CISO to actually stick will require a culture change within government and actual internal proficiency in a field that the government has relied heavily upon contractors to provide over the past two decades. It will take an army. To that end, buried within the more than $19 billion in overall spending is something called the CyberCorps Reserve program: a scholarship program for cyber-warriors.

The $62 million educational fund is a sort of Reserve Officer Training Corps program for "for Americans who wish to obtain cybersecurity education and serve their country in the civilian Federal government." An extension of the already-established National Science Foundation's and Department of Homeland Security's CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program, students can get full scholarships and stipends for cybersecurity undergradute or graduate programs in exchange for an agreement to work for the feds for a period equal to the length of the scholarship.

Already got your degree? If you're a cybersecurity expert and you come to work for the government, under Obama's proposal, you'll get any federal student loans forgiven. Technically, the government already does this for anyone under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness plan--it's not clear whether the CNAP goes further than that program, which requires 10 years of service.

The funding will also be used to develop a "Cybersecurity Core Curriculum" to guarantee students who study cybersecurity graduate with the skills required by the federal government. The Cybersecurity Core Curriculum is likely part of an effort to rationalize the tangle of certification programs that currently exist in information security. And CNAP seeks to beef up the National Centers for Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity Program, an effort by the Department of Homeland Security to recruit colleges and universities to churn out more cyber-skilled students.