William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
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Hewlett Foundation Announces $45 Million in Grants to MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley to Establish Major New Academic Centers for Cybersecurity Policy Research
Largest Ever Private Commitment to Field
Nov 18, 2014
MENLO PARK, Calif.—The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley today announced the establishment of three major new academic initiatives focused on laying the foundations for smart, sustainable public policy to deal with the growing cyber threats faced by governments, businesses, and individuals.

The new programs, established with $45 million in grants from the Hewlett Foundation—$15 million to each school—are supported through the Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. The Foundation has now committed $65 million over the next five years to strengthening the nascent field of cybersecurity, the largest such commitment to date by a private donor.

With the world increasingly dependent on the Internet for everything from banking to medical record keeping, the risk of disruption—from the merely inconvenient to the truly catastrophic—is clear, as is the need to develop workable systems capable of containing these threats over time. But government and industry have largely focused their separate, siloed security efforts on the immediate need to thwart enemies, hackers, and thieves.

The Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative is designed to foster the development of policy frameworks to help guide these actors toward sustainable solutions, to develop trust and improve communication among the disparate actors, and to train scholars and practitioners with the necessary combination of technological and policy expertise…