Category Archives: Sen. Rob Portman

Incident reporting, ransomware payment legislation faces trouble in Senate

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Legislation requiring critical infrastructure owners to report major cyber incidents to the federal government, and mandating that ransomware victims disclose when they make payments, has hit a significant snag in the Senate. A bipartisan group of senators announced a proposal in November that would require critical infrastructure owners and operators to report within 72 hours to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency when they suffer major cyber incidents, as defined by CISA. It also would require reporting of ransomware payments to CISA from a broader set of organizations, excluding only individuals and some smaller businesses, within 24 hours. Advocates hope that by requiring swift reporting of major incidents, federal officials can help reduce the damage more quickly. Gathering intelligence about ransomware payments would help law enforcement and national security officials understand and act on digital extortion trends, officials say. Backers were unable to advance the proposal last […]

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National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, new cyber kid on the federal block, begins to stake a claim

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National Cyber Director Chris Inglis is fleshing out what, exactly, his new office plans to do with itself. With a “strategic intent statement,” a personnel move, a pair of interviews and a newspaper op-ed, Inglis and his office on Thursday provided their most concrete objectives to date for a White House post that sprung into existence in January, and that Inglis won confirmation for in June. He joined a crowded field of feds focused on cyber, from other offices within the White House to departments and agencies like the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the National Security Agency. Inglis said Thursday that it’s a natural, when looking at the disparate organizations in the federal government with cybersecurity responsibilities, to wonder who’s in charge. But he said there were “more appropriate” questions. “How do we bring coherence, how do drive public-private collaboration, how do we have […]

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t tell CISA about ransomware incident, highlighting questions about information sharing

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t notify the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its ransomware incident, and CISA still didn’t have technical details about the attack as of Tuesday morning, the agency’s top official told senators. Acting director Brandon Wales also said he didn’t think Colonial would have reached out to CISA if the FBI hadn’t alerted his agency, he said in testimony before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That exchange — and others over the course of a hearing that touched on several major recent security incidents — served as yet another reminder that despite the constant drumbeat for improved cybersecurity information sharing between industry and government, it still doesn’t happen fully in even some of the most dire circumstances. “This is potentially the most substantial and damaging attack on U.S. critical infrastructure ever,” said Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the top Republican on the panel, in […]

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t tell CISA about ransomware incident, highlighting questions about information sharing

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Colonial Pipeline didn’t notify the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its ransomware incident, and CISA still didn’t have technical details about the attack as of Tuesday morning, the agency’s top official told senators. Acting director Brandon Wales also said he didn’t think Colonial would have reached out to CISA if the FBI hadn’t alerted his agency, he said in testimony before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. That exchange — and others over the course of a hearing that touched on several major recent security incidents — served as yet another reminder that despite the constant drumbeat for improved cybersecurity information sharing between industry and government, it still doesn’t happen fully in even some of the most dire circumstances. “This is potentially the most substantial and damaging attack on U.S. critical infrastructure ever,” said Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, the top Republican on the panel, in […]

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Feds aren’t well prepared to spot SolarWinds-style hacks at agencies, CISA official says

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In one of the bluntest assessments of U.S. government security shortcomings around the SolarWinds hack, a top Department of Homeland Security official told senators on Thursday that federal defenses simply aren’t aligned properly to detect advanced attackers. The testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on federal cybersecurity weaknesses points to a forthcoming reorientation of how DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency protects agencies from threats. It’s a shift resulting from the fallout from the hack at federal contractor SolarWinds that resulted in breaches at numerous federal agencies and major technology companies. And it’s a shift that Congress is aiding with $650 million that it recently appropriated for CISA. “Part of the challenge is that you can only secure what you can see,” Brandon Wales, acting director of the agency, told committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich. “Over the past decade our system of protection has largely relied […]

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Shoddy US government review of Chinese telcos endangered national security, Senate panel finds

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For decades, the U.S. government’s process for reviewing the cybersecurity risks of Chinese telecommunications companies operating in the U.S. has been so haphazard that it has “endangered our national security,” a bipartisan Senate review released Tuesday found. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said that the group responsible for these kinds of reviews, made up of national security officials from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice, largely failed to rein in Chinese telecommunications companies because of an “informal” process, insufficient resourcing, and a lack of statutory authority. Federal Communications Commission commissioners have likened the group’s review to an “inextricable black hole,” the report said. As a result of minimal oversight from the group, known as “Team Telecom,” Chinese state-owned telecommunications companies have been able to operate with relative impunity, even as concerns have mounted that Chinese state-owned companies could be enabling espionage backed by the Chinese government within the […]

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Senate investigation finds agencies ‘unprepared’ to protect Americans’ data

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Federal agencies are “failing to implement basic cybersecurity standards” needed to protect Americans’ personal data and keep the nation’s secrets safe from hackers, a Senate investigation has concluded. The report, which drew on 10 years’ worth of inspector general reports at eight agencies, paints a picture of persistent neglect of standard network defense measures. It comes more than four years after the breach of the Office of Personnel Management, in which alleged Chinese hackers stole sensitive personal data on 22 million current and former federal employees. Lessons from that sweeping compromise of American security clearances still haven’t been heeded, according to the report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs’ Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “Despite major data breaches like OPM, the federal government remains unprepared to confront the dynamic cyberthreats of today,” laments the report, which covered the departments of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland […]

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