France Spends Over 1 Billion on Cyber Security

Steven Petrov
The Paw Print

France is planning on strengthening its long-term neglected sector of Cyber defense, under the form of investing in modern technologies, informed Reuters.
The minister of defense showed the official plan which includes secured phone lines, encryption devices, and surveillance systems, which will protect the computer systems from becoming the victim of online theft and spying.
France and the leading western European countries such as, Germany, England etc. focused their attention on the cyber aspect of their defenses after the scandal with the eavesdropping and surveillance procedures that the US National Security Agency put these and many other countries under.
The French minister of defense Jean-Yves Le Drian, stated that this is a priority for the French government because the country’s capacity to organize and hold secret operations could be severely hurt from any cyber threats.
The majority of the money will go towards securing the Ministry of Defense and its partners were put under more than 800 cyber attacks throughout 2013.
The French government passed a new law in December, which enables the state to request any information from the different Internet or phone companies and get it on demand. This caused a huge wave of critique from the Internet freedom activists for ruining people’s privacy rights.
Around $400 million will be directed towards buying new equipment for all of the strategic and encrypting government companies, following hackers down, and surveillance of the internal webs. The government has not officially pointed out which companies have in mind, but this may surely be just a strategic step in trying to keep its defense and political issues highly classified.
The military is planning on building a special educational center near the Northwestern city of Ren, which will have a separate scientific sector dealing with the creation of the first French cyber weapons. The personnel in the department of Cyber defense will also be increased 6 times, which shows how seriously the French government has taken this issue.
With the increased usage of the Internet in the modern day world, countries have learned new ways of obtaining highly classified information regarding foreign political or business relations.
This has caused for corporations and countries around the world to spend billions of dollars in cyber protection, making sure that highly classified information stays secure and out of the gaze of foreign eyes.