The explosion of the Internet of Things has increased the vulnerability of all networked digital systems and devices. The internet has become an unsafe, open digital highway filled with marvelous capabilities that are constantly being attacked and exploited by hostile people, organizations and nations. Protecting this digital highway requires special purpose hardware, software and skilled technicians to manage the real time attacks and intrusions. But this cybersecurity layer comes at a cost, which has been hard for many government organizations to identify, track and predict.

This a paper presents the results of research into cybersecurity costs for executive departments and agencies of the federal government. Budget data provided through the OMB IT Dashboard was evaluated and filtered to identify cybersecurity specific activities supporting the development of business IT systems, as well as development of IT systems with a cybersecurity primary mission function. Data was sorted by agency and cybersecurity activity to identify potential correlation between the cybersecurity costs and other program costs leading to cost estimating methods for specific cybersecurity activities.

The paper presents:
1. Costs for IT systems with a primary function of providing cybersecurity to an agency.
2. Cost factors to estimate cybersecurity material costs (HW, SW) and support labor costs (program management, system engineering, test, documentation, etc ...) within a general business system.