On April 1, 2015, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO), establishing a new economic sanctions program, targeting individuals and entities who engage in certain types of cyber-crime and commercial espionage. Although economic sanctions are familiar policy tools, the EO represents an expansion of their use into a new field and provides new authority for the Departments of Treasury, State, and Justice to impose sanctions on primarily non-U.S. actors engaging in—or materially assisting or complicit in—malicious cyber activity, including thefts of trade secrets, and other misappropriation of economic information, that are considered to be a threat to the nation’s security, foreign policy, or the economy. For a complete summary, please click here.