“Cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.”

That statement came from President Barack Obama two years ago during his Cyberspace Policy Review. With cyber crime on the rise over the last decade, the President has made cybersecurity an Administration priority.

This week, the White House released a blueprint that it hopes will guide Congress in their crafting of cybersecurity legislation, unveiling an actual plan to better protect computer users.

“The proposed legislation is focused on improving cybersecurity for the American people, our Nation’s critical infrastructure, and the Federal Government’s own networks and computers,” the White House said in a press release.

White House Cyber Coordinator Howard Schmidt posted a blog explaining the legislation, emphasizing its collaborative approach to dealing with business.

“This is a milestone in our national effort to ensure secure and reliable networks for Americans, businesses, and government; fundamentally, this proposal strikes a critical balance between maintaining the government’s role and providing industry with the capacity to innovatively tackle threats to national cybersecurity. Just as importantly, it does so while providing a robust framework to protect civil liberties and privacy,” Schmidt wrote.

The legislation would empower the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to render fast consulting to private sector companies suffering from a cybersecurity problem. It would protect the proprietary information of those companies while codifying the ability of DHS to help with cyber intrusions.

Recognizing that private companies likely are going to be the first to encounter new cyber threats, the legislation would provide companies that share information on new viruses and the like to DHS with immunity. DHS must protect such information to ensure it does not infringe on individual privacy and civil liberties, under the proposal.

As the White House concluded in its release, “Our Nation is at risk. The cybersecurity vulnerabilities in our government and critical infrastructure are a risk to national security, public safety, and economic prosperity.”

Congress responded favorably to the Obama proposal, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid even releasing a copy of the legislation publicly.

The ball is now in Congress’ court to move forward on cybersecurity.

The new plan comes at a time where news is buzzing with cyber issues, most notably the issues Sony and its PlayStation Network have been having over a gigantic data breach.

In April, Sony’s network was the victim of the “Anonymous” hacks, which took the PlayStation Network down in a rather dramatic response to some legal issues that were cited as being against free speech. After the initial 6-day outage for all PSN users, the news of why the outages occurred was due to a massive data breach.

With a network that has been down since April 20, Sony came to the conclusion that the hacker group known as Anonymous is responsible for all of the down time and massive security breach.

Sony claims it has evidence that the hacktivist group is the bad guy in this scenario, and the ones who stole the data of hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Sony was being pressured by feds to get to the bottom of the issue.

Kazuo Hirai, chairman of the electronics giant wrote a detailed letter about the security breach to a U.S. Congressional committee, pegging Anonymous as the bad guy.