WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2017, cybersecurity industry officials were anxious, to put it mildly.
They fretted about the possibility of whiplash-inducing policy shifts that would scrap years of progress protecting government and industry from cyberattacks.
They feared that the outsider President — who’d already called on supporters to boycott Apple when it refused to help the FBI crack into its own encryption — might go to open war with the cyber and tech companies whose help he needed to secure the nation.
Most importantly, they lamented how the incoming President refused to accept intelligence agencies’ suspicions that Russia was responsible for a hacking and influence operation that upended the election that brought him to office. They feared that Trump, who famously suggested a lone 400-pound hacker could have been responsible, would stop naming and shaming its greatest foes in cyberspace.
What a difference two years can make.
Cybersecurity industry leaders and former government officials are now heaping praise on the Trump administration’s digital security policies, describing them as…
