The Obama administration is poised to appoint Howard Schmidt, a veteran IT security adviser in both business and government, as chief adviser to the president on cybersecurity policy.

President Obama announced the creation of the ‘cyber coordinator’ post back in May 2009, during a speech in which he said that “America's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity”.

The responsibilities of the role, he said, would include “orchestrating and integrating all cybersecurity policies for the government; working … to ensure agency budgets reflect those priorities; and, in the event of major cyber incident or attack, coordinating our response.”