U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered the establishment of a national intelligence center charged with overseeing the country's handling of foreign cyber-threats and attacks, the White House said.
  

The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center, to be established by the director of national intelligence, will focus on "connecting the dots" regarding malicious foreign cyber-threats, cyber-incidents affecting U.S. national interests and providing all-source analysis of threats to policymakers, the White House said.
  

"Cyber threats are among the gravest national security dangers to the United States," the top office said in a statement. "Our citizens, our private sector, and our government are increasingly confronted by a range of actors attempting to do us harm through identity theft, cyber-enabled economic espionage, politically motivated cyber attacks, and other malicious activity."
  

In creating the center, the U.S. government is applying some of the hard-won lessons from the country's counterterrorism efforts to augment a whole-of-government approach by providing policymakers with a cross-agency view of foreign cyber-threats, their severity, and potential attribution, the statement said.
  

Obama has made cyber-security a top priority for the remainder of his term, taking advantage of North Korea's alleged hacking attack on Sony Pictures late last year to highlight the country's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and the need for stronger protective measures.
  

The center's creation is the latest in a series of measures Obama has taken to bolster cyber-security.
  

Last month, Obama put forward a legislative proposal calling for companies to share threat information with the government, and used his State of the Union address to call for Congress to approve the proposal in a bipartisan manner.
  

Earlier this month, the White House hosted a conference in Silicon Valley with leaders from industry, tech companies, consumer and privacy advocates and law enforcement agencies and others, in an effort to share best practices, improve information sharing and encourage the adoption of more security technologies.
  

Obama also signed a new executive order aimed at encouraging and promoting the sharing of cyber-security threat information within the private sector and between the private sector and the federal government. (Yonhap)