According to Reuters, the House of Representatives just unanimously passed the Cyber Security Research and Development Act to provide $903 million over the next five years to promote computer security research. The money will be spent on grants, scholarships, and other incentives for academic research. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Standards and Technology will be disbursing the funds. The bill already passed the Senate in October, and President Bush is likely to sign it into law.
The bill came as a response to several major attacks on the Internet in the last year, including the biggest distributed denial of service attack ever just a few weeks ago.
The Reuters article is here.