An announcement made by the Obama administration Friday details an extensive plan for a national cybersecurity workforce drafted by a branch of the Commerce Department, the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, or NICE. As of now, there’s no definition that can accurately pin down to what being a cybersecurity professional really means, but the US government wants to at least raise public awareness of the hazards brought about by cyber breaches. Here’s a copy of the draft in PDF format.

“The public is insufficiently aware of the risk of sharing information in cyberspace — which can affect personal and national security,” the roadmap states.

The road map aims at maintaining “an unrivaled, globally competitive cybersecurity workforce,” targeting specific accomplishments over the coming years such as agencies adopting a cybersecurity competency model by 2012; officials creating a baseline for the required cybersecurity professional skills by 2013, as well as be able to assess the strength of federal, state and local cybersecurity staffing against defined competencies during the same year; and have federal contractors comply with standards of cyber workforce description to win government business by 2015.

“This plan will provide a path to a more secure digital nation,” states the document, which also attempts to gauge the influence of cyber publicity campaigns.

The government will provide a website that citizens and federal employees can refer to for cybersecurity awareness, with NICE launching an internal federal repository for sharing and storing reference materials as well.

Indeed, the digital age has given rise to a new breed of lawbreakers. Our enthusiastic digital gatecrashers’ favorite targets recently are branches that have something to do with national security, and the government in general. First of this year’s long list of casualties was EMC’s RSA Division. Though the attackers failed to secure important corporate and government data, they managed to obtain a good deal of information about a security tool called SecurID.

We also have Pentagon suffering one of the most fatal attacks in digital history, compromising over 24,000 files that were reportedly taken by attackers from a defense contractor. The breaching was believed to have been made possible by an e-mail scam. There’s also Northop Grumman and Lockheed Martin who were forced to shut down their network to prevent the further damage during the attack. Moreover, researchers from Invincea Labs and Threat Grid uncovered not too long ago a cyber espionage campaign against 163 key executives of defense contractors who attended the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects.

Aside from these high-profile hacking sprees, the government is also dealing with AntiSec party running wild and free since the dawn LulzSec. During the group’s so-called “Hack the Planet” week, they unleashed loads of information about Arizona’s Department of Public Safety. Now, it’s successor Anonymous and some members of the disbanded group continued the business as usual and unleashed 10GB of leaked law enforcement data to retaliate against the recent string of arrests of suspected members of the hacktivist collective.