The U.S. government is getting serious about cybersecurity. Earlier this week the White House published a preliminary list of of incentives for critical infrastructure companies that participate in the Department of Homeland Security’s nation-wide security program.

SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto views the development as a positive step towards comprehensive cybersecurity legislation. At the same time, he believes that the government will have to offer a broader set of incentives to attract companies from other sectors that are also facing increasing threats from hackers.

Retail and finance are two of the industries that fall under this category. Five Eastern European nationals were recently apprehended for allegedly compromising the private networks of the Nasdaq stock exchange, Citibank, PNC Bank and several other major financial institutions. The hacker group successfully obtained hundreds of millions of dollars worth of credit card numbers belonging to individuals in the U.S. and Europe.

John highlights that enterprises across all verticals will have to adopt data-driven intrusion detection solutions in order to fend off next generation cyber threats. As it happens, FireEye, a company that specializes in developing this kind of anti-malware software, filed for an IPO a few days ago.

The Milpitas-based cybersecurity film stated in an SEC filing that it’s looking to raise as much as $175 million on the stock exchange. The company didn’t disclose much else, not even the date of its public offering or target price range.

The fact that companies are becoming more security conscious is good news for consumers, but some are arguably taking it too far. Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for pulling contact information from AT&T’s website, a punishment that John considers to be overly harsh. He shared his take on the controversial case in an interview on SiliconANGLE NewsDesk.